The goal of ending world hunger by 2030 is being pushed back

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“Between 702 and 828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021,” or about 9.8% of the world’s population, summarizes in a joint report FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the United Nations Fund for Children (UNICEF), the World Food Program (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

“We must sound the alarm”: the goal of ending hunger in the world by 2030 is moving dangerously away, five international organizations working on food security warned at the UN on Wednesday, drawing a particularly “blackboard” for 2021, even before it erupts the war in Ukraine.

“We hoped that today the world would have overcome the crisis of the new coronavirus pandemic, but it continues to be here” and worsened due to armed conflicts and other humanitarian crises, the director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) found ), Chu Dongyu, during a press conference held in New York.

“Between 702 and 828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021,” or about 9.8% of the world’s population, summarizes in a joint report FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the United Nations Fund for Children (UNICEF), the World Food Program (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

This number is up by 46 million compared to 2020 and by 150 million compared to 2019, the two years marked by the pandemic and the ongoing weakening of food systems.

“The world is moving away from its goal of eradicating hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030,” the FAO warns, referring to the UN’s sustainable development goal of Zero Hunger.

Some 670 million people are expected to continue to suffer from hunger at the end of the decade, a number “similar to 2015”, when this target was set by the international community.

Unless drastic measures are taken by then, “all our efforts will only have succeeded in mitigating the impact of the major crises we have experienced,” IFAD president Gilbert Ungbo warned during an interview with French Agency.

The five international organizations are “sounding the alarm” in the face of the “intensification of the main drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition: conflicts, extreme weather events and economic shocks”.

Shocks to come

“The question is not whether we will continue to face adversity in the future,” they conclude, “but whether to take bolder steps to build resilience against future shocks,” such as the war in Ukraine, which is disrupting supply chains and taking off prices.

“If we had been able to carry out this work in the past, the war would not have had such a devastating impact as it does today,” said the director of the PEP, David Beazley, in his own intervention.

“We need a political solution immediately in Ukraine,” he added, so that agricultural products that remain blocked in Ukrainian ports – an estimated 25 million tons of grain – can be “sold back on the market.”

The Horn of Africa (Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia) is also experiencing one of the worst droughts in more than 40 years, decimating livestock and crops and threatening to cause famine that will affect more than 16 million people, according to the UN.

“One of the challenges is development aid, although we know very well that it cannot meet” the needs by itself, Gilbert Ungbo noted. He called on governments to offer “more incentives” to encourage the private sector to support innovation and transformation of agricultural production systems.

More broadly, 2.3 billion people suffered from acute or moderate food insecurity at some point in 2021, meaning they did not have access to sufficient food or had difficulty eating during certain periods.

The majority of them live in rural areas of developing countries, particularly in Asia and Africa, explained the IFAD president.

“The most shocking thing about this situation is that the main cause (of the famine) is not so much a global deficit in production, as the deeply unequal and unbalanced global food system,” commented the French branch of the NGO Oxfam in a statement.

RES-EMP

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