According to the United Nations, more than 1 billion people — one of every six persons on this planet — go hungry each day. In a world of unprecedented prosperity, that statistic is shameful. More appalling still, the number of undernourished individuals is growing despite rising levels of affluence and wealth. It is a moral imperative that we halt this alarming trend and work to eliminate the growing problem of hunger worldwide.

If morality is not sufficient motivation, then more hard-nosed practical considerations should suffice: Hunger undermines growth, creates instability and ultimately threatens the legitimacy of an international order that condemns one-sixth of its members to a daily struggle to survive.

A survey of the global food situation paints a disturbing picture. According to the World Food Program (WFP), 1.02 billion people are undernourished, a number equal to the combined populations of the United States, Canada and Europe. Nearly all of them — 907 million — live in the developing world.

The Asia-Pacific region is home to two-thirds of the world's hungry. The number of undernourished people grew by 75 million in 2007, and another 45 million in 2008. The global economic crisis is likely to make the number swell further still.

The existence of hunger must not be seen as a fact of life or some abstract phenomenon. A child dies of hunger or related causes every six seconds, 17,000 a day. In the developing world this equates to some 6 million deaths annually. Iron deficiency, the most common form of malnutrition worldwide, affects about 2 billion people. The World Health Organization has estimated that eliminating iron deficiencies can increase national productivity levels by as much as 20 percent. That is consistent with WFP studies that show that malnutrition during childhood can cause an individual to earn 5-10 percent less over his or her lifetime.

The dangers are not just to individuals alone. Hunger breeds unrest. The price of wheat, which supplies about 20 percent of food calories consumed worldwide, doubled in 15 months during 2007 and 2008. A surge in food prices last year triggered riots in more than a dozen countries; one government (that of Haiti) was forced to resign as a result.

Fears of shortages and instability have prompted governments to stockpile key staples, creating bottlenecks and exacerbating the situation in other states: In a globalized food chain, local decisions quickly ripple beyond national borders.

This sad situation has not gone unnoticed. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) convened a World Food Summit this month to focus on the problem. Representatives from more than 200 countries attended but, as is too often the case, top-level attention was lacking. Only one head of state from a Group of Eight country — Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi — attended, as the meeting was held in Italy's capital.

The meeting began on a troubling note. The assembled representatives rejected the U.N. call to commit $44 billion annually to spur agricultural production in developing nations. The final declaration omitted a pledge sought by the U.N. to eliminate world hunger by 2025, an implicit repudiation of one of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. That omission spurred criticism of the declaration by FAO head Jacques Diouf, the Vatican — which called the lack of financial targets "disturbing" — and a slew of nongovernmental organizations, some of which dismissed the entire summit as a waste of time and money.

Aid is important. It is a moral imperative in a world in which the number of overweight people equals the number of the malnourished; the fact that in some countries as much as one-third of the food purchased is thrown out uneaten is an abomination. But all too often, aid merely compounds problems. Rather than building domestic capacity and the infrastructure that will yield sustainable agricultural production, food aid is designed more to support developed world producers — reducing food surpluses — and merely increases the culture of dependence by reducing the priority recipient governments give to agricultural development. Instead, self-reliance must be the goal.

The best insurance against chronic malnourishment is to help the hungry feed themselves. The summit did yield a pledge to help farmers in developing countries and to break the dependence of poor countries on food aid. But if this is more empty rhetoric, it is worse than nothing because it may obscure a problem.

The most important step forward is creating new markets for the goods of poor and struggling nations. In other words, it is vital to return to the original purpose of the Doha Development Round — to help developing countries — and conclude a world trade agreement.

Developed nations, Japan prime among them, must recognize that opening domestic agricultural markets is in their own best interest — even if that entails a short-term political cost in the process. That is the sort of change that the new government in Tokyo should embrace — and will demonstrate the sort of leadership that Japan should be offering the world.