ROME -- Six million children under five are dying of starvation every year while progress in the world fight against hunger has virtually ground to a halt, the UN Food Agency said Tuesday on the eve of World Food Day.

Jacques Diouf, head of the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said member countries were falling far short in their world food summit commitment to halve the number of the world's hungry by 2015. "The good news has been that the number of undernourished people in the developing world continues to decline. The bad news has been that the decline has been too slow, that our progress has been falling far short of the pace needed."

The current decline in the number of hungry is 2.5 million a year over the past eight years, said Diouf in a foreword to the report.

Latest estimates put the number of undernourished people in the world at 840 million, almost 800 million of them in developing countries.

"If we continue at the current rate, we will reach the world food summit goal 100 years late, closer to the year 2050 than to 2015. Clearly, that is simply unacceptable," said Diouf.

Diouf said it was "simply imperative" to set a new target of annual decline at 24 million each year from now until 2015, despite it being ten times the pace achieved over the past eight years.

The world was paying a high price for inaction over hunger, he said, citing the example of six million children under the age of five who die as a result of hunger and malnutrition each year. "That is roughly equivalent to the entire population of children under five in Japan, or in France and Italy combined."

At the World Food Summit in Rome last June, Diouf had warned the clock was ticking in member countries' race against the 2015 deadline to half the number of the world's hungry. "The currency most urgently needed is not dollars but commitment."

"We do not have the excuse that we cannot grow enough or that we do not know enough about how to eliminate hunger.

What remains to be proven is that we care enough," said Diouf, who is from Senegal.

According to the FAO report, "the state of food insecurity in the world 2002", the chief cause of hunger in a world of abundance continues to be poverty. Among the other main causes are drought, floods, armed conflicts and political, social and economic upheavals, AFP reported. "Frequently, these shocks strike countries already suffering from endemic poverty and struggling to recover from earlier natural and human-caused disasters."

Currently, FAO says 32 countries face "exceptional food emergencies", with an estimated 67 million people requiring emergency food aid as a result.

Diouf restated the case for a FAO plan presented in June to kick-start an accelerated campaign against hunger that would help the World Food Summit reach its 2015 target.

It said an investment of 24 billion dollars (euros) a year, shared equally be developed and developing nations, would sharply lower the number of hungry and yield 120 billion dollars a year in benefits.

On Wednesday, FAO Director General Diouf will launch World Food Day 2002 in Rome with Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez.