Nearly 800 million people suffer from hunger in the world.
In 2022, 258 million people needed emergency food aid to survive. The figure was 193 million a year earlier. Acute food insecurity is on the rise “for the fourth consecutive year”with millions of people “suffering from hunger so severe that it directly threatens their lives”underline the actors of the sector which brings together in particular the Organization of the United Nations for food and agriculture (FAO), the World Food Program (WFP) or the European Union.
The first thing to bear in mind is that we are only talking here about emergency food aid which is increasing, that is to say where we are intervening to support the populations . Some 258 million people is 60 million more than two years ago, with 58 countries concerned including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Yemen.
And these poor numbers are anything but a surprise. As of last September, some were already sounding the alarm, with another even more impressive figure: that of people who suffer from hunger in the world. This represents around 800 million people on the planet.
Conflicts: the first factor in food crises
Although the causes of malnutrition are multiple, they have one thing in common: they are all linked to man’s attitude on earth. “Conflicts remain the main driver of food crises“, this is underlined in any case in a report by the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations with consequences that we do not think of, such as the increase in the price of fertilizers and foodstuffs, which is fatal for the poorest.
When it is not wars, it is global warming due to human action that aggravates the situation. The scary example this year is the one known as El Niño. The World Meteorological Organization now estimates that there is a 60% chance that El Niño will develop by the end of July, with more droughts and floods all over the planet on the way.
NGOs are constantly ringing the alarm bell because they lack resources, with an absolute priority, that of saving as many children as possible. It is the first duty of adults to protect and save children. And malnutrition is not just a matter of the number of meals, as explained by Delphine Pinault, humanitarian manager at Care. To save a child is first of all to allow him to become a man. “We may save lives by providing a two-year-old child with one meal a day. But what is the quality of this meal”she asks herself. “There are so many forms of malnutrition that the child may stay alive but not develop as it should,” she adds, referring to the first 1,000 days of a child, which includes the period of pregnancy where food and the quality “is absolutely crucial to ensuring that these children grow into healthy adults”.
The NGOs are also asking that the political world be mobilized to invest in agriculture, to limit the impact of global warming or even by preventing conflicts, because according to them, it is first and foremost a matter of will.