As a result of conflicts, economic shocks and climate crises, food insecurity increased further worldwide in 2022, with 258 million people needing emergency assistance that year compared to 193 million in 2021, several UN agencies said on Wednesday.
“This seventh edition of the Global Report on Food Crises is a scathing observation of the failure of humanity to move towards the elimination of hunger, the number 2 sustainable development goal” of the United Nations, deplored in the report its secretary general, Antonio Guterres.
Acute food insecurity increased last year “for a fourth consecutive year”, 65 million additional people “suffering from hunger so severe that it directly threatens their lives”, underline the 16 actors of the global network on the food crises, including the European Union, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP).
This report on the year 2022 includes five more countries than the previous one, or 58 in total, which also helps to pull the figures up.
Acute food insecurity encompasses levels 3 to 5 of the international food security scale: ‘crisis’, ’emergency’ and ‘disaster’. Some 40% of those affected in 2022 “resided in just five countries: the DRC, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Yemen”.
In addition, 376,000 people are in the most critical “disaster” phase, and 57% of them live in Somalia.
Since the end of 2020, this country has suffered, like the rest of the Greater Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya and Sudan), the worst drought in the last 40 years, which a recent scientific study by the World Weather Attribution blamed global warming.
However, “humanitarian funding to fight hunger and malnutrition is not up to par,” says Mr. Guterres.
The new executive director of the World Food Program (WFP), Cindy Hensley McCain, also deplored, during a press conference, “financial resources which are decreasing day by day” and which lead “to reducing rations for millions of people who are hungry.
COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine
Last year, “more than 35 million children under the age of five suffered from wasting or acute malnutrition, including 9.2 million from severe wasting, the deadliest form of undernutrition,” the report says.
“Conflicts remain the main driver of food crises”, according to the FAO, even if these are often the result of an accumulation of factors.
Economic shocks, mainly related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the repercussions of the war in Ukraine, weighed more heavily last year in some countries, notably in Afghanistan, Syria and South Sudan.
They have plunged, in the space of one year, 30.2 million additional people into acute food insecurity.
Ukraine and Russia being two major producers of fertilizers, wheat and sunflower oil, the war “has disrupted agricultural production and trade in the Black Sea region, causing an unprecedented spike in prices international food products in the first semester”.
Although an agreement allowing the export of Ukrainian grain via the Black Sea on July 22 brought prices down, “the war continues to indirectly affect food security, especially in low-income countries, dependent on food imports and already weakened by the pandemic.
On the other hand, because of “the escalation and [de] extension of the conflict to a full-scale war”, 25% of the Ukrainian population suffered from acute food insecurity at moderate or severe levels, the report notes.
Extreme weather events such as the Horn of Africa drought and the devastating floods in Pakistan are also major causes of increased hunger.
“We are now expecting, for the end of 2023, the arrival of the climatic phenomenon “El Niño”. We know that it impacts many regions of the world, with episodes of drought, floods… We must not wait until it is too late”, declared Rein Paulsen, director of the Office of Emergencies and Resilience of the FAO, in an interview with AFP.