The fact that the number of people around the world suffering from malnutrition and hunger has increased by 100 million in a year is a wake-up call for all countries. So is the 24-hour fast observed by Jacques Diouf, director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the weekend ahead of the World Food Summit, which opened yesterday in Rome.

With less than six years left for the deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the year 2015, it is obviously very difficult to basically eradicate poverty. Little wonder the UN food chief and the UN secretary-general went on strike for a day to call for particular attention to food security from all over the world.

The economic meltdown caused by the financial crisis on Wall Street has over-focused the attention of both developed and developing countries on efforts to revitalize the growth of their national economies. Bailout plans by almost all governments seem to have eclipsed the necessity for increasing efforts toward poverty alleviation worldwide.

In fact, the donors are falling short by $35 billion per year on the 2005 pledge on annual aid flows by the Group of Eight and by $20 billion a year on aid to Africa, according to the 2009 Report of the MDG Gap Task Force.

The recovery of economic growth is not yet clearly visible worldwide and the international community is at the crossroads on to what kind of substantial measures to take against the effects of climate change. But we cannot afford, at this moment, to ignore the misery of more than 1 billion people who do not even have enough to eat.

It is not just because of sympathy that we have to extend a helping hand. It is also because development globally will not be sustainable when the polarity between the haves and have-nots keeps on expanding with the further growth of the world economy.

Poverty is one of the major sources of problems, including social upheavals, political instability and conflicts between different ethnicities. All these pose a threat to world peace and to the overall development of the world economy.

China has set a good example in this regard by lifting more than 200 million villagers out of poverty in the past three decades. Had it not been for the great input of both financial and human resources for poverty alleviation, China would not have achieved what it has and neither would it have had the political stability for further development.

With the current world population of 6.6 billion likely to increase to 9.1 billion by 2050, food security cannot be overemphasized. The MDGs will be nowhere near enough by that time to provide people in impoverished areas with basic necessities.

If the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen as it is now, we can hardly imagine how miserable poverty-stricken people in underdeveloped areas will be by that time. And neither can we imagine how their conditions and the troubles that they will create will impact the overall development of the international community.

So, the efforts to alleviate poverty worldwide are as important as those to revive economic growth.