More and more people are starving, sometimes dramatically so, because of wars, economic and climate crises. According to an analysis by international organizations, 258 million adults and children worldwide were affected by acute hunger or even humanitarian famine last year. They registered around 65 million more people than in 2021 (193 million) and almost twice as many as in the pre-pandemic year 2019 (135 million).
The alarming figures were announced on Wednesday by the European Union, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The three organizations founded the Global Food Crisis Network (GNAFC) in 2016.
“More than a quarter billion people are facing acute hunger today, some on the verge of starvation,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres wrote in the report’s foreword. “That is unforgivable.” Rein Paulsen, the FAO director for emergencies and resilience, recognized “a very worrying picture”. The 258 million people are “at risk households whose lives and livelihoods are threatened,” he emphasized.
Hunger emergencies and food crises are measured using a five-level, so-called IPC scale – the GNAFC classified a good quarter of a billion people in levels 3 to 5. Acute hunger is level 3. According to the report, around 35 million people were affected by humanitarian emergencies (level 4) in 2022, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Yemen.
The experts speak of a famine for around 376,000 people, the highest IPC level 5. More than half of them live in Somalia; many people are also at risk of starvation in Afghanistan, Haiti and South Sudan. However, the real number of people affected by famine is even higher, for example because no usable data was transmitted from Ethiopia for the report. It is estimated that more than 400,000 people were suffering from famine there at the end of 2021.
The fact that the report for 2022 comes to a total of 258 million hungry people in levels 3 to 5 is also due to the fact that five more countries were analyzed than in the previous year. However, the proportion of hungry people also increased in percentage terms: while 21.3 percent of the population in the crisis countries were still suffering from at least acute hunger in 2021, the figure was 22.7 percent last year. In the affected countries, physical consequences, some of which were very severe, were found in more than 35 million children under the age of five.
As in previous years, the report named conflicts and the economic consequences of Corona and the Ukraine war as the main reasons for the many food crises in the world. Guterres wrote of “human failure” in the fight to end world hunger. “In fact, we’re moving in the other direction.”
“The economic resilience of poor countries has decreased dramatically over the past three years,” says the analysis. Some regions also experienced momentous weather and climate crises, such as the drought on the Horn of Africa or floods in Pakistan.
FAO expert Paulsen called for rapid action to be taken in the fight against hunger and food problems. He advocated investing more funds in time-sensitive projects in agriculture. According to the FAO, many farming families in poor countries are particularly helped when local agricultural projects are supported there.
