The United Nations (UN), has said that the number of people going hungry in the world has risen by 122 million to 735 million since 2019 because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
If current trends continue, almost 600 million people will be chronically undernourished by 2030 – about 119 million more than if neither of these events had happened, the UN said in a new report.
While the numbers of people facing hunger globally have stabilised after increasing sharply from 2019 to 2020, hunger is still on the rise in western Asia, the Caribbean and across Africa, according to the report released by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and four other UN bodies on Wednesday.
“Recovery from the global pandemic has been uneven, and the war in Ukraine has affected diets,” said Qu Dongyu, the FAO director general. “This is the ‘new normal’ where climate change, conflict and economic instability are pushing those on the margins even further from safety.”
According to reports, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is a major producer of wheat, maize and sunflower oil, has led to a steep rise in food prices globally, and while the FAO’s food price index has fallen, the impacts are still being felt.
The 2023 edition of the annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report shows a world gripped by a widespread and urgent food crisis. In 2022, an estimated 900 million people – or 11.3% of the global population – were suffering from severe food insecurity, defined as when a person has run out of food or has gone an entire day without eating during the year.
Nearly one in three people – 2.4 billion, or 29.6% of the world’s population– did not have constant access to food, the report found. Millions of children continue to be malnourished: in 2022, 45 million children under five were suffering from wasting, the deadliest form of malnutrition, and 148 million children of the same age had stunted growth and development.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
