UN / FOOD SECURITY REPORT LAUNCH; “hunger remains deeply entrenched and is rising”

In much of the world, “hunger remains deeply entrenched and is rising”, Secretary-General António Guterres said today (13 July), at the launch of this year’s major UN food security update, which highlights that over the past five years, tens of millions of people have joined the ranks of the chronically undernourished. Guterres said the COVID-19 pandemic “is making things even worse” as “many more people could slip into hunger this year.” The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report “is clear” he said, and stressed that “if the current trend continues, we will not achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2 — zero hunger — by 2030.”

The Secretary-General said, “investments in COVID-19 response and recovery need to help deliver on our longer-term goal of a more inclusive and sustainable world. We must make food systems more sustainable, resilient and inclusive – for people and planet.” Announcing that he will be convening a Food Systems Summit in 2011, Guterres said, “we must make healthy diets affordable and accessible for everyone.” The authoritative global study tracking progress towards ending hunger and malnutrition, is produced jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Fund for Agriculture (IFAD), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Food Programme (WFP) and World Health Organization (WHO).

WFP chief David Beasley said, “we’ve got to make certain that we thread that needle right now, between COVID pandemic and how we react to that, along with the hunger pandemic.” Beasley said “if we don’t handle it right, you are going to see mass starvation, famines, mass migration, political destabilization. And the cost of that is a thousand times more than coming in and addressing it at the early stages and doing it right.”

FAO Director General Qu Dongyu said, “we will need to redouble efforts dealing with the challenges brought about by COVID-19. The pandemic poses a threat to food security and nutrition.”

UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta H. Fore said, “major disruptions in the food, health, social protection systems, are putting an increasing number of children at risk of malnutrition.” She said UNICEF estimates that COVID-19 “will result in a 15 percent rise in the number of wasted children, and an additional six to seven million children needing critical nutrition services, mostly in South Saharan Africa and South Asia.”

For his part, General Assembly President Tijjani Muhammad-Bande said, “over two billion people today suffer from malnutrition” and those suffering from hunger “are at greater risk of developing severe COVID-19 symptoms as a result of associated health conditions, such as malnutrition and non-communicable diseases, which compromise immune system.”

Compounding this, he said, “is the fact that those who are hungry are often trapped in poverty and do not have access to health services, water and sanitation facilities, or indeed the space to quarantine or practice social distancing.” While Asia currently has the greatest quantity of undernourished (381 million), people, the report showed that the number in Africa is growing fast (250 million), followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (48 million). And although the global prevalence hungry has changed little, over the last five years, hunger has grown in step with the global population, which, in turn, hides great regional disparities.

With 19.1 per cent of its people undernourished, Africa is hit hardest and becoming even worse. This is more than double the 8.3 per cent rate in Asia and 7.4 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean. On current trends, by 2030, Africa will be home to more than half of the world’s chronically hungry.