AT the 21st century's start, the most fractured human right is not liberty of ex-

Eresslon or protection from ar-itrary arrest. It is the right to food.

One out of five, who live In the developing world today, are chronically hungry, says the Food and Agriculture Organization. That adds up to 790 million men. women and children.

"Malnutrition is an exquisite form of torture and It vitiates other human rights.' the late FAO Regional Representative Dloscoro Umall told a conference of Aslan executives. "Businessman or beggar, man has a fundamental right to adequate food."

But "a headcount, shows those Imprisoned by hunger far exceed political prisoners." the Filipino National Scientist added "What we have on hand today is a massive infraction of

human rights."

The ill-fed today approximate the population of over 61 Cambodias. FAO's Stale of Food and Agriculture report asserts.

"This estimate captures the trend." the Worldwatch Institute agrees. But breaking down calories per person, as FAO does, "does not account for unequal distribution of food, found virtually everywhere '

The disparities are bleak. Average food Intake of a Canadian child, for example. Is 3.058 calories daily. Compare that to an Indonesian kid's 1.859. a Filipino's 2.356 or a Vietnamese's 2.502.

The malnourished also blur

the inroads into hunger since the First World Food Congress met. at the Hague, in the early 1970s. That Congress Issued the landmark proclamation on the human right to food

At the Second World Food Conference. Henry Kissinger proposed a target: Bv 1984, no man, woman or child, would go to bed hungry."

"The greatest absolute progress in reducing hunger was made in Asia." once the world's basket-case, the new State of the World 2000 report notes. In Latin America, the number of underweight children was cut by half.

But there have been serious setbacks, too. In Africa, the

number of wasted children doubled. Hunger exacerbated by the AIDS epidemic has seen life expectancy nosedive.

Barring agricultural break-througlis, plus a "medical miracle, some African countries may lose one fifth or more of their adult population during this decade" the Worldwatcn report foresees.

Thus, the World Food Summit, in 1996, scaled back to a more modest" target: reduce the hungry by about five Singa-pores (20 million) yearly.

This would halve, by the year 2015. the over 831 million people, who went to bed hungry bi the early 1990s.

Since then, about eight million were lifted out of hunger zones annually. FAO reports. This decline is less than half of what the chastened Summit set out to do. Why?

- DEPTHneivs.