An additional problem is that the FAO's calculations on energy requirements are based on the claim that shorter people need fewer calories. Objectively this is true, but it confuses cause and effect. As Hickel notes, "shorter stature of population is quite often a sign of undernourishment, so it makes little sense to conclude—as the FAO does—that as populations get shorter they require fewer calories. Indeed, in many cases, it is probably that the opposite is true". Further the FAO estimates the calories needed to avoid hunger based on a sedentary lifestyle, overlooking the physically exigent lifestyles of many people in the Third World.

If we measure hunger at the more accurate (and still conservative) level of calories required for normal activity, we see that 1.5 billion people are hungry, according to an annex in the FAO's 2012 report, which is twice as many as the UN would have us believe. If we measure hunger at the level of calories required for intense activity, the number of hungry is 2.5 billion. And the numbers are rising, not falling, even according to the new [FAO] methodology

There is an eerie parallel between the World Bank's metric for poverty and the FOA's metric for hunger: both use standards so removed from reality that they simply erase the problems they propose to measure. For the World Bank, the poverty threshold falls between one or two dollars daily, regardless of whether people can actually meet their fundamental needs with that sum. For the FAO, the hunger line is a set of minimum level of calories, regardless of real nutritional needs. Since the quality and content of these calories are not taken into account, people having serious vitamin or other nutrient deficiencies are not counted as undernourished.

From, The Lie of Global Prosperity: How Neoliberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty and Exploitation by Seth Donnelly, pages 47-49