Of course, when the Millennium Campaign pushed the base year back to 1990, the hunger trend appeared to get a little better. And diluting the goal to focus on proportions instead of absolute numbers helped a little bit too. But even with these changes, in 2009 the hunger headcount was still 21 per cent worse than it was in 1990. The UN was forced to concede defeat, publishing a report admitting that the hunger goal was going to be impossible to achieve: instead of decreasing, ‘hunger has been on the rise for the past decade’.14
