5 The prevalence of underweight children under-five in the developing world has declined by 5 percentage points between 1990 and 2006.
Millennium
Development Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Target: Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger
Some progress has been made in reducing the prevalence of underweight children under five in the developing world. Prevalence declined from 31 to 26 per cent between 1990 and 2006 (based on a subset of 76 countries with trend data for the period 1990 and 2006, covering 83 per cent of the developing world's population). Despite this overall improvement, though, the rate of decline is not enough to reach the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target.
The greatest declines in underweight prevalence are in the regions of Central and Eastern Europe / Commonwealth of Independent States (CEE/CIS) and East Asia and the Pacific. In CEE/CIS, prevalence decreased from 11 to 5 per cent between 1996 and 2006 (trend data were not available for most countries around 1990). In East Asia and the Pacific, prevalence dropped from 23 to 14 per cent between 1990 and 2006. This improvement was driven by gains in China, where underweight prevalence declined by more than half.
