More and more hungry people in the world. The worst data since 2017
258 million people in the world live in conditions of severe malnutrition and lack of access to food. Last year, this phenomenon intensified compared to 2021, when 193 million people lived in a state of emergency. The data for 2022 is the worst since 2017, when a comprehensive study of the famine phenomenon began.
According to the report of the Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD), an organization associating representatives of eight African countries, prepared together with the Food Security Information Network (FISN), the threat of hunger in the world is growing. The worst situation is in several African countries, as well as in the Middle East, which are at war. The population of war-torn Afghanistan is also at serious risk.
More than 26 million citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country with numerous natural resources, but torn apart by internal conflicts and plundered by transnational corporations, are at serious risk of starvation. Ethiopia came second with 23.6 million people at risk, but the extent of malnutrition is somewhat smaller.
The share of starving people in the country's total population is highest in Yemen. In a country devastated by civil war and the aggression of Western-backed Saudi Arabia, 55% of the population is starving. The same percentage applies to Syrians, but in this case it is malnutrition, not starvation. In Yemen, an additional 31,000 people are on the brink of starvation. In Afghanistan, devastated by American occupation and civil war, 19.9 million people, or 46% of the population, are starving. 6.1 million are extremely malnourished.
The report on world hunger points out that in the most affected countries, the gap in the level of nutrition between the small elite and the general population is growing. Hunger affects mainly the weakest - refugees, the sick and children. Developmental disorders of malnourished children are a huge problem. In the most affected countries, they have problems with proper weight and height development. In 2022, the phenomenon affected 4.8 million children in Ethiopia, 2.8 million in Sudan, 1.5 million in Somalia and 1.4 million in South Sudan. In extreme cases, malnutrition causes an increase in infant and child mortality.
The report lists three main causes of famine. The first is armed conflicts. They are ongoing in most of the affected countries. The situation has deteriorated significantly in countries such as Yemen, Afghanistan, as well as South Sudan and Sudan, where internal conflicts have flared up again.
The second factor is the international crisis, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which supplies developing countries with a significant amount of cereals. They caused an increase in the stratification of societies. The poor have felt it the most, losing food security, among other things. Poor countries have become less resilient to successive crises.
The third factor was natural disasters - the worst prolonged drought in decades in West Africa - the so-called Horn of Africa covering Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, tropical cyclones in the south of the continent, and in Asia, especially in Pakistan, a series of floods on a massive scale. Natural disasters have devastated many agricultural regions whose production was used to feed millions of people. The authors of the report point to record high food prices in countries where all of the above-mentioned factors have been combined. For example, in Somalia grain prices have increased by 142% compared to the average prices of the last 5 years. In Sudan, the price of a kilogram of sorghum, one of the staple crops, increased by 243% in 2022 compared to the previous year. Many farmers lose their farms and are forced to buy food. In turn, a decrease in local production causes an increase in prices.
According to the authors of the famine report in Africa alone, in 2023 more than 30 million people will need urgent food assistance due to the situation in which they find themselves. This is especially true for the inhabitants of Somalia and South Sudan. It is estimated that infighting in Sudan may significantly increase the number of those in need of immediate assistance. More than a million Sudanese have left their homes in recent months, of which around 250,000 have taken refuge in neighboring countries. Many rural farming communities were destroyed by the war or forced to flee, and even before the outbreak of the civil war, the situation, especially in the Sudanese countryside, was difficult.
IGAD calls on the UN and the World Health Organization to take coordinated action to combat hunger. It also informs that getting out of the current crisis will require many years of action.
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