Rome—Venezuela will be perhaps the most controversial recipient of an FAO hunger-fighting award on June 7, when the agency honours more than 15 countries for achieving the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of the population who are unable to consume enough food for an active and healthy life.

 The Latin American country was recognised as having achieved the goal in 2013, two years before the UN deadline of 2015, but had not so far collected its diploma from FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva.

 Last week the agency announced that the number of hungry people in the world had fallen to 795 million, or around one person out of every nine, 216 million fewer than in 1990-1992.

 Venezuela’s achievement has been overshadowed by recent economic and political problems that call into question its progress in the fight against malnutrition.

 A recent poll by Caracas-based Datanalisis found shortages and inflation had replaced security as the biggest worry for Venezuelans, a surprising result for one of the most violent countries on earth, with 82 murders per 100,000 of population last year.

 Urban Venezuelans spend an average of five hours per week looking for goods in their sparsely stocked supermarkets.

 President Nicolas Maduro blames the shortages on far-right groups backed by the United States, but many observers attribute them to the government’s incompetence and ideological rigidity.

 Inflation in the OPEC-member country, which has suffered the consequences of a recent decline in world oil prices, reached 68.5 percent at the end of last year, undoing much of the benefit of the country’s anti-poverty measures.

 A study by three of Venezuela’s main universities found 45 percent of households were living in income poverty in 1998, a year before the election of pioneering socialist leader Hugo Chavez. By the end of last year that figure had risen to 48.4 percent, largely as a result of rampant inflation, according to the study.

 “If we truly wish to create a world free from poverty and hunger, then we must make it a priority to invest in the rural areas of developing countries where most of the world’s poorest and hungriest people live,” IFAD President Kanayo Nwanze said last week.

 But FAO’s own figures raise doubts about Venezuela’s success in battling hunger.

 The food component of the basket of goods that compose the consumer price index was up 75 percent between May 2013 and May 2014, the agency reported.

 Mr Nwanze’s call for a transformation of rural communities “so they provide decent jobs, decent conditions and decent opportunities” does not appear to have been heeded in Venezuela, where food production per capita declined by 1.29 percent from 2007 to 2012 and where the proportion of the labour force employed in agriculture declined by 1.7 percent between 2009 and 2014.

 “We are not recognising anything new. Venezuela was already publicly acknowledged in June 2013 for having met both the MDG and (more stringent) World Food Summit (WFS) hunger targets,” an FAO official said.

 The calculations of the nutritional status of the population were objectively measured and independently confirmed, the official said.

 “Venezuela has unequivocally made progress by the internationally accepted MDG and WFS standards,” he said. “Today, less than 5 percent of the country’s population falls into the most severe hunger category, that is around 1.5 million people, down from 2.8 million in 1990-1992.

 President Maduro will be in Rome on June 7 but will not be attending the awards ceremony himself. He has a conflicting appointment with Pope Francis in the Vatican.