Food crisis is real

“Adversely affected are the demands for wheat, maize, barley and sunflower oil. Ukraine and Russia are said to account for 30 percent of global wheat exports.

“Total number of people facing acute food insecurity and requiring urgent food assistance has nearly doubled since 2016.

The next global crisis after Covid-19 is food. In fact, the virus has not totally dissipated — it won’t seem to go away soon — but food shortage is also happening now, according to an expert.

“Food shortages work in two ways. One is you have the tragedy of people actually starving to death. But second is, much larger numbers of people are poorly nourished, and that makes them more vulnerable to existing diseases,” Peter Sands, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told Reuters on 7 June.

What’s causing the current food shortage are rising food and energy prices, which Sands attributed to the war in Ukraine.

The food crisis “could kill millions both directly and indirectly,” he said.

While the World Health Organization estimates 15 million people may have died so far from Covid-19, many countries are suffering from the effects of soaring food prices.

The Guardian online recently published a long report, “Apocalypse now? The alarming effects of the global food crisis,” which quoted Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, “suggesting Britain was facing

‘apocalyptic’ levels of food price inflation… In fact, Bailey was talking as much about the drastic impact of Ukraine-war-related rises in food costs and food shortages on people in poorer countries.”

“‘There’s a major worry for the developing world as well... Sorry for being apocalyptic for a moment, but that is a major concern,’ said Bailey.”

If Britain is suffering from high cost of living, Egypt and Brazil will have a hard time dealing with “increased food insecurity,” said The Guardian, quoting “international risk consultants Verisk Maplecroft,” adding that “many governments had exhausted their financial and material reserves fighting Covid and incurred large debts.”

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has also been quoted, saying “tens of millions of people” will suffer from this food insecurity leading to “malnutrition, mass hunger and famine in a crisis that could last for years, increasing the chances of a global recession” — likewise attributed to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Adversely affected are the demands for wheat, maize, barley and sunflower oil. Ukraine and Russia are said to account for 30 percent of global wheat exports.

“Ukraine’s wheat production this year is likely to be 35-percent down, and exporting much of it may be impossible due to Russia’s Black Sea blockade. In March, global commodity prices, recorded by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, hit an all-time high. They remain at record-breaking levels,” said The Guardian. More disturbing details in the report:

“The World Food Programme estimates about 49 million people face emergency levels of hunger. About 811 million go to bed hungry each night. The number of people on the brink of starvation across Africa’s Sahel region, for example, is at least 10 times higher than in pre-Covid 2019.”

“The total number of people facing acute food insecurity and requiring urgent food assistance has nearly doubled since 2016, according to the

Global Network Against Food Crises, a joint UN and EU project. And the scale of the challenge is expanding, up by 40 million people, or 20 percent, last year. The network’s latest report pinpointed countries of particular concern: Ethiopia, South

Sudan, southern Madagascar and Yemen, where it said 570,000 people — up 571 percent on six years ago — were in the most severe or ‘catastrophe’ phase of food insecurity, threatened by the collapse of livelihoods, starvation and death.”

Four other countries — Argentina, Tunisia, Pakistan and the Philippines — were described as

“highly dependent on food and energy imports.”

It would take a highly concerted effort among President-elect Bongbong Marcos’ economic team to confront and take the necessary measures to arrest this frightening phenomenon.