Using 1990 as a base year, when about 24 percent of the population in the region was undernourished, the Food and Agriculture Organization said the percentage has been cut to 12 percent, enabling the region to meet the U.N.'s ambitious Millennium Development Goals to halve undernourishment by 2015. The food body announced in Rome that worldwide the number of hungry people around the world had dropped to 795 million from over a billion a quarter-century ago despite natural disasters, ongoing conflicts and poverty.