not swipe step right! By the time you finish reading this text, five people will have died of hunger or malnutrition – and that’s just in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia. This disaster could have been avoided, and lives can still be saved, if we act quickly.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
Of course, we would prefer not to hear about world hunger. After more or less successfully surviving six pandemic waves and witnessing the possibility of a third world war, all against a backdrop of ecological crisis, we would rather turn to the carefree horizon of summer holidays.
But that would be putting an ostrich in the face of the growing difficulty of part of the world’s population to feed itself. While the means of production are enough to feed the planet and billionaires, especially in the agri-food sector, are getting richer even in times of pandemic, hunger has increased by 20% in 2021.
Today, nearly 200 million people suffer from acute food insecurity in the world. More than five times the Canadian population.
One of the most worrying contexts is that of Somalia. The country is going through its fourth rainy season… without rain. Judging by the weather forecast, a fifth waterless season is looming. More than a quarter of this country of 15 million inhabitants is already in a situation of food crisis. That’s one in four people who don’t have enough to eat and have to resort to extreme means of survival like sending their children to work in town, selling their livestock at a discount or pulling their daughters out of school to marry them off and no longer have to feed them. The scar of the 2011 famine threatens to reopen.
Somalia is one example among many others: Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Niger, Lebanon, Syria, Haiti… The number of regions of the world in food crisis is exploding and the sad cocktail of the “three Cs” – COVID-19, conflict and climate – is very often at issue. In these already fragile countries, the pandemic has not only cut the incomes of populations often deprived of a safety net, it has also worsened the indebtedness of the State to the point of preventing the public investments necessary to counter the shocks.
Armed conflicts are one of the main causes of hunger. Insecurity prevents people from moving around to cultivate or trade and prevents humanitarian aid from reaching the most isolated communities. Added to these local disturbances are the repercussions of the conflict in Ukraine.
Some 90% of the wheat consumed in East Africa comes from Russia and Ukraine, and oil inflation has doubled or even tripled the price of some food staples, such as vegetable oil and flour. agricultural fertilizer.
Finally, climate change is deepening its scars. Droughts, more and more frequent and intense, are followed by floods because the soil no longer absorbs water and drains what has been sown. More and more farmers are being forced to move, losing their land and the social network that enabled them to survive. And this, ironically, in countries responsible for a negligible fraction of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. When we talk about injustice…
In 2011, 260,000 people lost their lives in Somalia due to hunger, half of them children. We said “never again”. In 2017, donor countries answered the call and famine was largely averted.
Today, while the G7 countries pledged to prevent famine a year ago, we drag1. Less than 20% of the funds requested by the United Nations have been granted.
The additional aid of $250 million to the World Food Program announced by the Government of Canada on the eve of the G7 Summit is an important gesture. However, although half of humanitarian crises are predictable, only 1% of budgets go to prevention and preparedness. It would be inspiring to see the Prime Minister urging his peers to act proactively, long before the worst happens in the most vulnerable countries2. So that at the next G7 Summit, the food crisis is no longer on the agenda.
* Co-signers: Céline Füri, Humanitarian Coordinator, Oxfam-Québec, and Nadja Pollaert, Executive Director, Doctors of the World Canada