World Hunger Rising as UN Warns Of ‘Looming Catastrophe’

By Staff, Agencies

World hunger levels rose again last year after soaring in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Ukraine war coupled with climate change now threaten starvation and mass migration on an “unprecedented scale” this year, UN agencies reported.

Up to 828 million people, or nearly 10 percent of the world’s population, were affected by hunger last year, 46 million more than in 2020 and 150 million more than in 2019, agencies including the Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Program, and World Health Organization said on Wednesday in the 2022 edition of the UN food security and nutrition report.

World hunger levels had remained relatively unchanged between 2015 and 2019.

“There is a real danger these numbers will climb even higher in the months ahead,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley, adding that price spikes in food, fuel and fertilizers stemming from the Russia-Ukraine war threaten to push countries into famine.

“The result will be global destabilization, starvation, and mass migration on an unprecedented scale. We have to act today to avert this looming catastrophe,” he added.

Russia and Ukraine are the world’s third and fourth-largest grains exporters, respectively, while Russia is also a key fuel and fertilizer exporter.

The war has disrupted their exports, pushed world food prices to record levels and triggered protests in developing countries already contending with elevated food prices due to COVID-19-related supply chain disruptions.

The UN report warned of “potentially sobering” implications for food security and nutrition as conflict, climate extremes, economic shocks and inequalities keep intensifying.

It estimated that globally in 2020, 22 percent of children under five years old were stunted while 6.7 percent or 45 million suffered from wasting, a deadly form of malnutrition that increases the risk of death by up to 12 times.

The gender gap in food insecurity, which grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, widened even further from 2020 to 2021, the report said.

Driven largely by widening differences in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in Asia, it said that “in 2021, 31.9 percent of women in the world were moderately or severely food insecure compared to 27.6 percent of men.”