Some 733 million people will face hunger in 2023 due to conflict, climate change and economic crises, says a UN report.
The goal of eliminating global hunger by 2030 appears increasingly impossible to achieve, as the number of people suffering from chronic hunger has barely changed over the past year, a UN report says.
The annual report on the State of Food and Nutrition Security in the World, published on Wednesday, he said An estimated 733 million people will face hunger in 2023 – one in 11 people globally and one in five in Africa – as conflict, climate change and economic crises take their toll.
David Laborde, director of the division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) that helps prepare the survey, said that while progress has been made in some regions, the situation has deteriorated globally.
“We are in a worse situation today than we were nine years ago, when we launched this objective of eradicating hunger by 2030,” he told the Reuters news agency, saying that challenges such as climate change and regional wars have become more serious than they were. predicted a decade ago.
If current trends continue, around 582 million people will suffer from chronic malnutrition by the end of the decade, the report states.
Regional trends varied significantly, with hunger continuing to rise in Africa, where population growth, wars and climate disruption have weighed heavily. In contrast, Asia saw little change and Latin America improved.
The report also noted that 71.5 percent of people in low-income countries were unable to afford a healthy diet last year, compared to 6.3 percent in high-income countries.
While hunger is easy to detect, poor nutrition is more insidious but can nevertheless scar people for life, harming the physical and mental development of babies and children and leaving adults more vulnerable to infections and diseases.
“Malnutrition affects a child’s survival, physical growth and brain development,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell in a statement.
But she noted how global child stunting rates have fallen by a third, or 55 million, over the past two decades and said this shows that investments in child nutrition can address today’s challenges.
“We must urgently step up funding to end child malnutrition. The world can and must do it. It is not only a moral imperative, but also a solid investment in the future,” said Russell.
The UN also said the way the anti-hunger campaign was financed had to change because greater flexibility was needed to ensure countries most in need get aid.
“We need to change the way we do things to be better coordinated, to accept that not everyone should try to do everything, but rather be much more focused on what we are doing and where,” Laborde said.
Laborde noted that international aid linked to food and nutrition security amounted to US$76 billion per year, or 0.07 percent of the world’s total annual economic output.
“I think we can do better to fulfill this promise of living on a planet where no one goes hungry,” he said.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
