> 120 million Chinese people suffer from malnutrition
>
> About 120 million Chinese people suffer from malnutrition and the country's
> poverty problems are still pressing, said Vice-Agriculture Minister Zhang
> Baowen at a conference to mark the 23rd World Food Day on Thursday.
It then went on to say:
> Statistics show the country's poor population has decreased from 250
> million in 1978 to 28.2 million in 2002.
Which made me wonder: does that make any sense to say? That your country only has 30 million poor people -- but 120 million are suffering from malnutrition? Don't the 120 million have to be considered poor under any reasonable definition? They're starving.
When they are asserted to be not poor, does that simply mean they now earn over a dollar a day in tradeable income? If, for argument's sake, the number of malnutrished Chinese has stayed the same over that period, or gotten worse, does it make sense to say there are fewer poor people in China than 25 years ago?
I was also wondering if these are UN statistics that everyone studying China uses. The second half of the article seems to suggest that they originated with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (the FAO).
Michael