The number of people living under the international poverty line of $1.25 a day declined from 1.8 billion to 1.4 billion between 1990 and 2005.
The proportion of people living in extreme poverty in developing regionsdropped from 46 per cent to 27 per cent.
The World Bank estimates that the effects of the economic crisis will push an additional 64 million people into extreme poverty in 2010, and that poverty rates will be slightly higher in 2015 and beyond than they would have been without the crisis, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern and South-Eastern Asia.
About one in four children under the age of five is underweight in the developing world, down from almost one in three in 1990.
Between 1990 and 2008, the proportion of underweight children under fivedeclined from 31 percent to 26 percent in developing regions with particular success in Eastern Asia, notably China.
Over a 25-year period, the poverty rate in East Asia fell from nearly 60 per cent to under 20 per cent. Poverty rates are expected to fall to around 5 per cent in China and 24 per cent in India by 2015.
Southern Asia alone accounts for almost half the world’s undernourished children. In all developing regions, children in rural areas are nearly twice as likely to be underweight as those in urban areas.
In contrast, little progress has been made in reducing extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, where the poverty rate has declined only slightly, from 58 to 51 per cent between 1990 and 2005.
The estimate of the number of people who will suffer chronic hunger this year is 925 million, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN — down from 1.023 billion in 2009, but still more than the number of undernourished people in 1990 (about 815 million).