RECORD 193 MILLION RELY ON AID AS WORLD HUNGER SOARS

▶ ‘Perfect storm’ of conflict, climate change and coronavirus will worsen crisis, says UN agency

Conflict, climate change and Covid-19 have pushed the number of people facing severe food insecurity to “devastating” all-time highs, a study has found.

The Global Network Against Food Crises said 193 million people needed urgent, lifesaving assistance last year, nearly double the 2016 figure.

It was a rise of nearly 25 per cent, or 38 million people, in 12 months on the record numbers of 2020.

“The outlook moving forward is not good,” says the sixth annual GNAFC report.

“If more is not done to support rural communities, the scale of the devastation in terms of hunger and lost livelihoods will be appalling.”

Contributors to the multi-agency study who met yesterday said the effects of the war in Ukraine indicated that there was worse to come without intervention.

“We are seeing a perfect storm in the world, just when we couldn’t imagine it getting worse,” said the World Food Programme’s David Beasley.

The UN agency’s executive director said the war was “devastating food security around the world” and that millions more would be affected.

He said rising energy prices had raised the costs of shipping and logistics, while wheat supplies from the breadbasket of Europe were in jeopardy as “agricultural fields turn into battlefields”.

The cost of the WFP’s global operations has increased by $70 million a month since 2019.

“We have the money in the banks. Governments and the private sector need to unleash funds to fight this problem,” Mr Beasley said.

“If we don’t get ahead of this then we will not just have famine but we will have destabilisation in nations and mass migration by necessity.”

Conflict continues to be the primary driver of food insecurity, says the report. It says Russia’s invasion of Ukraine poses serious risks to global food security, especially in crisis countries like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Haiti, Somalia, South Sudan and Syria.

The UN’s Humanitarian Affairs agency said the “dramatic”

upward trend was a result of a relentless few years, with more than 80 million people now on the move, including 50 million internally displaced people “whose numbers rise every year”.

Russia and Ukraine are major food producers and the head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Qu Dongyu, said the war had already exposed the “interconnected nature and fragility of global food systems.”

Last year, Somalia got more than 90 per cent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine; the Democratic Republic of Congo received 80 per cent, while Madagascar imported 70 per cent of the food staple from the two countries.

East Africa is facing its worst drought in nearly half a century, threatening millions of people with water and food shortages.

According to the report, in Ethiopia, South Sudan, southern Madagascar and Yemen, about 570,000 people – 571 per cent more than in 2016 – were in the most severe or “catastrophe” phase of food insecurity, requiring urgent action to avert starvation and the widespread collapse of livelihoods.

Maximo Torero, chief economist at the FAO, said the outlook for the global food economy in 2022 was precarious and that vulnerable countries would become even more so than before.

In a joint statement, the EU, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and WFP, together with USAid and the World Bank said the situation “calls out for at-scale action”.