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Nearly one in three people in the world cannot adequately feed themselves. Corona is causing one of the sharpest increases in hunger in decades. Yet the pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg, the United Nations warns.
The Corona pandemic has increased the number of people suffering from hunger worldwide by 18 percent, according to a U.N. report. The “economic collapses resulting from the Corona response around the world have led to one of the worst increases in global hunger in decades,” according to a joint report by several U.N. agencies.
The international community was already off track toward its agreed-upon goal of eradicating hunger by 2030 before the pandemic, the organizations note. The pandemic has now caused further backsliding. According to the report, the full impact of the pandemic cannot yet be estimated. But according to the report, around 118 million more people were affected by hunger last year than in 2019.
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The increase in moderate or serious food insecurity has been as high as in the previous five years combined, he said. “Nearly one in three people in the world lacked access to adequate nutrition in 2020 – an increase of nearly 320 million people in just one year,” the report said. Among them, it said, are millions of children who do not get enough to eat to grow up healthy. Most malnourished children live in Asia and Africa, according to the report.
Half of the malnourished live in Asia
According to the report, the countries worst affected by hunger were those where disasters occurred as a result of climate phenomena or where there were armed conflicts – or both. Between 720 and 811 million people – just under a tenth of the world’s population – were estimated to be undernourished. This was 70 million to 161 million more than in 2019, he said, and the increase was significantly higher than in previous years.
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“The Covid 19 pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg,” the authors write. Even more alarming, they say, is that it has exposed vulnerabilities that have built up in the food system in recent years. These, they say, are consequences of conflict, climate change and weather extremes, and economic downturns.
According to the report, more than half of all undernourished people live in Asia (418 million), and more than a third in Africa (282 million). In Latin America and the Caribbean, about 60 million people suffer from hunger, according to the data. The sharpest increase in the number of hungry people in 2020 was in Africa. There would be about 46 million more than in 2019.
An antidote: climate risk insurance for small farmers
According to the current forecasts, the international community’s goal of stopping hunger by 2030 can only be achieved with “enormous efforts.” In particular, drastic measures would have to be taken to eliminate inequalities in access to food. As examples, the experts cited humanitarian aid to conflict areas or support programs in the form of cash or in-kind contributions to mitigate food price fluctuations. Broader access to climate risk insurance for smallholder farmers was also mentioned.
However, if nothing changes, some 660 million people could still be affected by hunger in 2030, according to UN experts’ forecasts – partly due to the long-term effects of the pandemic. According to current estimates, this would be about 30 million more people than in a scenario in which the Corona crisis had not occurred. “We are moving in the wrong direction,” the report’s authors warn.
The organizations involved pointed to the opportunity to address these issues at two major international food and nutrition summits and at the U.N. climate change conference this year. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the children’s charity Unicef, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization were involved in the report.
Source: ntv.de, chl/AFP/dpa/picture: pixabay.com
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