27. In the 1996 Rome Declaration on World Food Security, 186 governments made the solemn promise "to eradicate hunger in all countries, with an immediate view to reducing the number of undernourished people to half their present level no later than 2015". More than half the period has passed with little or no reduction in the numbers of poor and undernourished people. But there is progress of a sort: The goal has been diminished. The UN Millennium Declaration promises "to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger," using 1990 as the baseline. With world population estimated to increase by 36% in the 1990-2015 period, the sought reduction in the number of poor and undernourished people between 1996 and 2015 is now not 50% but merely 19% (T. Pogge, "The First UN Millennium Development Goal: a Cause for Celebration?", Journal of Human Development, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2004, pp. 377-397; Spanish translation by David lvarez Garc?"El Primer Objetivo de Desarrollo de la ONU para el Milenio: żUn Motivo de Celebraci?). In the face of 18 million poverty-related deaths per year, the official go-slow approach is morally unacceptable and the lack of efforts toward implementing this approach appalling. It should also be said that the World Bank's severely flawed poverty measurement method leads to a gross understatement of the number of people living below its $1/day poverty line (S. Reddy & T.W. Pogge, 'How Not to Count the Poor', 2002. Unpublished working paper, available online at <www.socialanalysis.org>, accessed on January 8, 2007). Moreover, this poverty line is, of course, grotesquely low. (Just imagine a family of four living on $2200 per year in the US or on £1100 in the UK.) The World Bank provides statistics also for a more adequate poverty line that is twice as high: $786 PPP 1993 ($1100 PPP in 2006 or roughly $275 in the typical poor country) per person per year. 2735 million people — nearly half of humankind — are said to live below this higher poverty line, falling 42 percent below it on average (Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, "How Have the World's Poorest Fared Since the Early 1980s?", World Bank Research Observer, 2004, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp., 153,
