The United Nations on Monday lamented a “dramatic deterioration” in world hunger over the past year, saying that much of it is likely related to the pandemic and calling for billions of dollars to save millions of people from starvation.
A report published jointly by five UN agencies said hunger outpaced population growth in 2020, with an estimated nearly 10% of all people being malnourished.
The greatest increase in hunger has been in Africa, where 21% of the population – 282 million – is estimated to be undernourished.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the new “tragic data” shows that between 720 million and 811 million people in the world went hungry last year – up to 161 million more than in 2019.
According to the report, more than 2.3 billion people, or 30% of the world’s population, lacked access to adequate food all year round. This indicator, known as the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity, increased as much in one year as it did in the previous five years combined.
“Despite a 300 percent increase in global food production since the mid-1960s, malnutrition is a major factor contributing to lower life expectancy,” said the UN chief. “In a world of plenty, we have no excuse for billions of people lacking access to healthy food. This is unacceptable.”
Emily Farr, of humanitarian organization Oxfam, said the pandemic was the last straw for millions of people already affected by the effects of conflict, economic shocks and a worsening climate crisis.
Children paid a heavy price: 149 million children under the age of 5 are estimated to have stunted growth because they are too small for their age, and more than 45 million children are too thin for their height, the report said. It also noted the paradoxical problem that nearly 39 million children are overweight.
“A full 3 billion adults and children are excluded from a healthy diet mainly due to excessive costs,” the UN agencies said, and COVID-19 made the situation worse.
“In many parts of the world, the pandemic has triggered brutal recessions and threatened access to food,” the United Nations said in a summary of its results. “But even before the pandemic, hunger was spreading; Progress on malnutrition has been delayed. “
“Worryingly, in 2020 hunger skyrocketed in both absolute and proportional terms, outpacing population growth,” concluded the report’s authors. According to the report, an estimated 9.9% of the world’s population was malnourished last year, compared to 8.4% in 2019.
Geographically, in addition to the rise in famine in Africa, more than half of the undernourished people – 418 million – live in Asia, while 60 million live in Latin America and the Caribbean, the report said.
Oxfam’s Farr said the new numbers are “a grim reminder of how broken our global food and economic systems are”.
“More than half of the world’s population had no social protection to deal with the negative effects of the pandemic,” she said. “Smallholder farmers watched their crops rot during the pandemic, even as global food prices rose 40% while the largest food companies added over $ 10 billion in additional revenue last year.”
The United Nations said the pandemic fell short of a key UN goal of not starving by 2030. Based on current trends, she estimates that the target “will be missed by nearly 660 million people” and that approximately 30 million of that number “could be related to the ongoing effects of the pandemic.”
Guterres said he would convene a global food systems summit “to make an urgent change” during the annual meeting of world leaders in September at the General Assembly. He said a meeting ahead of the Rome summit later this month should work out “how to address hunger, the climate emergency, incredible inequality and conflict by reshaping our food systems”.
The report on the state of food security and nutrition in the world was prepared by UN agencies such as the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Program and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. The other two organizations were the United Nations Children’s Fund, commonly known as UNICEF, based in New York, and the World Health Organization (WHO), based in Geneva.
The UN’s recommendations included one calling for “strengthening the resilience of the most vulnerable economic adversities”, for example through programs to reduce the effects of “pandemic shocks” or drastic increases in food prices.
Maximo Torero, chief economist for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said removing 100 million people from chronic malnutrition would require an additional $ 14 billion a year by 2030 – and to meet the goal of starvation by 2030, “we spoke of $ 40 billion. ”
Lederer reports from the United Nations
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