About 284 million people are facing acute or very severe hunger and malnutrition around the world, a new United Nations report said today. An earlier report found that 821 million people are living with chronic hunger.
More than 143 million people in 42 countries are just one step away from facing acute hunger and another 113 million people in 53 countries experienced severe food shortages in 2018, said the new report published jointly by the World Food Programme (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the European Union (EU).
Some of this acute hunger is caused by deliberate policies of warring factions to starve civilians as a weapon of war, unlawfully deny humanitarian access to civilian populations in need and deprive people of their means to produce food.
Nearly two-thirds of those facing acute hunger are in just 8 countries: Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
Climate and natural disasters pushed another 28 million people into acute food insecurity in 2018. Another 13 countries, including North Korea and Venezuela, are not in the analysis because of unreliable data. In 17 countries, acute hunger is still rising or unchanged from 2017.
“To truly end hunger, we must attack the root causes: conflict, instability, (and) the impact of climate shocks, said WFP Executive Director David Beasley. “To save lives, we also have to save livelihoods,” added FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva.
Acute food insecurity is when people’s inability to consume adequate food puts their lives or livelihoods in immediate danger. Chronic hunger is when a person is unable to obtain enough food to maintain a normal, active lifestyle over an extended period.
The Global Report on Food Crises is produced each year by the Global Network Against Food Crises led by the FAO, WFP and EU, and made up of international humanitarian and development partners.
The report called for much more international cooperation to link together prevention of hunger, preparedness to reduce it, and measures to handle it more effectively wherever it appears. Root causes of hunger include climate change, economic shocks, conflict and displacement of people because of manmade or natural catastrophes.
Its findings highlight the need for actions across the humanitarian and development dimensions of food crises, including more investment in reducing conflicts and building sustainable peace.
Alarmed by rising manmade hunger, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 2417 in May 2018, allowing it to use a full range of tools, including sanctions, to ensure that parties to conflicts do not violate international humanitarian law by using hunger as a weapon.
Brij Khindaria