The latest world survey shows hunger increasing from COVID-19 impact, on top of five years of a worsening situation. Heads of a panel of UN agencies released their report at a virtual summit today, also addressed by UN General Assembly President Tijjani Muhammad Bande, UN Ambassador from Nigeria, and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who spoke of his plan for a world “Food Systems Summit” in 2021. Up until 2014, some progress was made in the world picture of hunger, but since then it has worsened every year.
“I said 2020 would be worse than World War II” for a food emergency, said David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Program (WFP), who stressed that he gave this forewarning, “even before” the locust outbreak in Africa and South Asia, and the pandemic.
Details are given in “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020,” issued by the FAO, WFP, WHO, UNICEF, and IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development . The report, which these agencies issue annually and which is also known as SOFI, is available in English and other UN languages here: https://data.unicef.org/resources/sofi-2020/
In brief, as Beasley put it, in the last four to five years, there have been some 777 million people in chronic hunger, which number in 2019 has risen to 821 million, and is now rising much more. He expressed special concern for those thrown into “acute” food insecurity, who are “marching toward the brink.” He thinks that this category “before COVID-19,” was 80 million a few years ago, then reached up to 130 million, and by the end of this year could be 270 million people. In other words, a “scale up by 130-140 million.”
