Despite remarkable progress achieved since the Second World War, especially in parts of Asia, abject poverty remains widespread in many parts of the world. According to the World Bank’s much cited “dollar-a-day” international poverty line, which was revised in 2008 to $1.25 a day in 2005 prices, there are still 1.4 billion people living in poverty, although this represents a decline from the 1.9 billion in 1981. This figure is higher than the 2004 estimate of 984 million made with the old measure of $1-a-day. Poverty is the principal cause of hunger and undernourishment. According to most recent estimates of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO, 2009), the number of hungry people worldwide is 963 million (figure I.1), or about 14.6 per cent of the estimated world population of 6.6 billion, representing an increase of 142 million over the figure for 1990-1992. Most of the undernourished are in developing countries. Insofar as the poverty line is supposed to be determined principally in terms of the money income needed to avoid going hungry, the large discrepancy between the numbers for poverty and hunger and especially between their apparent trends becomes a source of rather fundamental concerns about the significance of the measures being used and cited.