Famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause has been political instability, not global food shortage. The Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen, has argued that nations with democracy and a free press have virtually never suffered from extended famines. And while a 2010 UN report stated that 925 million of the world's population of nearly seven billion people were in a constant state of hunger, it also notes that the percentage of the world's population who qualify as "undernourished" has fallen by more than half, from 33 percent to about 16 percent, since Ehrlich published "The Population Bomb."