Tracking hunger.

• Position: FROM READERS - Letter to the Editor

In the name of historical accuracy, I want to protest the inaccuracy of the first sentence of the article "The Price of Hunger" [March/April, Environmental Intelligence]. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] did not begin "keeping track in the 1970s...." It began to track the statistics of hunger under Director General B.R. Sen in the late 1950s and the first mentions were in Dr. Sen's introduction of the Freedom From Hunger Campaign to the United Nations and to the General Conference of FAO in 1960.

By the time of its First World Food Conference in 1963, the statistics on hunger were part of the major Basic Studies on the state of world agriculture put out as the background papers for the several commissions of the Food Congress. The statistics, including the numbers suffering from outright hunger and those suffering from malnutrition, were also part of every publication of the Campaign and every major speech of the director general, and were repeated by major NGOs and national Campaign committees from every continent for the rest of the decade.

What poor quality research. And what a down-putting for a great leader, B.R. Sen, who...