More than a quarter of a billion people faced severe hunger in 2022
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More than 258 million people across 58 countries faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2022, according to a new United Nations-led report. Despite years of warnings, experts say this latest hunger crisis is part of a long and avoidable cycle.
More than 258 million people across 58 countries faced severe hunger in 2022, the highest rate of food insecurity in the last seven years, according to a new United Nations-led report. Fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine, local conflict, climate change and the economic impacts of COVID-19 — including high inflation, the report found — were the major drivers of hunger.
Still, despite these challenges, many critics say food insecurity at this scale is largely avoidable.
“Organizations and others in power have been ringing the alarm bells for years, as this latest hunger crisis is part of a long and avoidable cycle,” Emily Farr, food and economic security lead for Oxfam, a global organization that focuses on the alleviation of global poverty, told Yahoo News. “But the international community doesn't seem to heed these warnings and fulfill their responsibilities until true catastrophe hits, and even then it’s still not enough.”
Acute food insecurity means people are in dire need of food, nutrition and livelihood assistance. The report’s authors say that competing priorities with crises taking place all over the world often leave resources thin, which results in issues like hunger, particularly in poorer countries, growing increasingly dire over time.
According to the report, which was commissioned by U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme, the World Bank, the European Union, the United States and members of the Global Network Against Food Crises, about 40% of the population in IPC Phase 3 or above — or about 108 million people — lived in just five countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Yemen.
People in seven countries — Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen — faced starvation at some point last year.
Dr. Manenji Mangundu, Oxfam’s South Sudan country director, told Yahoo News that hunger has plagued the region so severely that girls as young as 11 years old are being forced into marriage so that their family receives some income from the exchange. Mangundu called the situation “alarming” because funding alone could solve many of the issues.
“This can be avoided because these are negative coping mechanisms they're taking,” he said.
The second-largest driver was climate change, which affected 117 million people across 19 countries/territories, followed by local conflict, which affected 57 million people across 12 countries.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the report’s findings “unconscionable.”
“This [report] is a stinging indictment of humanity’s failure to make progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 2 to end hunger and achieve food security and improved nutrition for all,” Guterres wrote in the report’s foreword.
In many of these regions, including sub-Saharan Africa, young children have also taken the brunt of the crisis. Over 35 million children under 5 years old are suffering from wasting, or acute malnutrition, also defined as low weight-for-height; 9.2 million of them have severe wasting, the most lethal form of undernutrition and a major contributor to child mortality.
The report projects that up to 153.3 million people of the analyzed population will experience high levels of acute food insecurity in 2023. To combat further extreme hunger, experts urge the international community to act early and often to avoid more catastrophe. Such efforts include educating regions on how to adapt to how the changing climate affects their food production, and learning how to invest their earnings and supporting peace initiatives. Experts also stress the need to address the drivers of food insecurity, which include Russia’s war in Ukraine; this focus could, in turn, help avoid the cycle of raising money to try to fix a problem already out of control.
“Tackling hunger may seem overwhelming, but we know what works to meet people's immediate needs and to get communities back on track for the future,” Farr said. “We need to get food and money to people in need now, to support them to protect and recover their livelihoods … and once we've averted the worst from happening now, we need to work with communities to prevent this from happening again.”
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