This is The Prophecy. The Prophecy is much more than seeing into the future. For The Prophecy sees without the limits of time. For The Prophecy sees what is, what was, and what always shall be.
Children in Rafah city queue to receive a bowl of food for their families from charity organizations, in Rafah, southern Gaza on May 03 2024. – Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images
A top UN official has said that the north of Gaza has now tipped into “full blown famine” that is heading toward the south, as the war nears the seven month mark,
Cindy McCain, the American director of the UN World Food Program, became the most prominent international official to say that famine has already hit the war-devastated Gaza strip. Since March the UN and aid organisations have been saying that famine is “imminent” in pockets of Gaza but have not yet formally made a declaration.
“It’s horror,” McCain told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview to air Sunday. “There is famine — full-blown famine — in the north, and it’s moving its way south.”
McCain said that a ceasefire, as well as a greater flow of aid across land and sea routes, are desperately needed.
In the north of the besieged strip civilians have been cut off from most aid supplies and driven into hiding by the intensity of the fighting. Acute malnutrition rates among children under five have surged from 1% before the war to 30% by March.
Samantha Power, the director of the US Agency for International Development is the only other American official to have made the assessment that famine is already gripping Gaza.
Everyone in Gaza is going hungry. About 2.2 million people are surviving day by day on almost nothing, routinely going without meals. The desperate search for food is relentless, and usually unsuccessful, leaving the entire population – including babies, children, pregnant or nursing women and the elderly – hungry. The Gaza Strip was already in the throes of a humanitarian crisis before the war, mainly due to Israel’s 17-year blockade. About 80% of the population relied on humanitarian aid. Some 44% of households were food insecure and another 16% were at risk of food insecurity. Given this starting point, it is clear why Gaza plummeted into a full-blown catastrophe so quickly.
On 21 December 2023, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Famine Review Committee (FRC) published a report on the situation in Gaza. The FRC, which consists of independent experts, uses the internationally accepted classification of food insecurity levels, the most severe being Phase 5 – Catastrophe/Famine. According to this method, urgent intervention is needed as of Phase 3 (Crisis or worse) in order to protect the population.
The FRC report is based on information collected in the Gaza Strip from 24 November 2023 to 7 December 2023. The committee found that during this time, in four of five households in northern Gaza and in half of IDP households in the south, residents went days without any food and many skipped meals to feed their children. About 93% of the population in Gaza – some 2.08 million people – were suffering from acute food insecurity at Phase 3 or higher, with over 15% – 378,000 people – already at Phase 5.
The report also forecasts that by 7 February 2024, the entire population of the Gaza Strip will reach Phase 3 or worse. At least one in four residents – more than 500,000 people – is expected to be at Phase 5, facing extreme food shortages, hunger and exhaustion. According to the report, if current conditions persist, there is a significant risk that famine will be declared throughout the entire Gaza Strip within six months. Such a declaration is made when 20% of households reach Phase 5, when 30% of children suffer from severe malnutrition, and when two adults or four children out of 10,000 die of hunger every day.
Similarly, a UNICEF survey from 26 December 2023 found that an increasing number of children are not receiving their basic nutritional needs. About 90% of children under age two in Gaza consume food from two or fewer food groups. In a survey conducted two weeks earlier, the figure was 80%. The nutrition of pregnant and nursing women has also been severely compromised, with 25% consuming only one type of food, and almost 65% only two types.
This reality is not a byproduct of war, but a direct result of Israel’s declared policy. Residents now depend entirely on food supplies from outside Gaza, as they can no longer produce almost any food themselves. Most cultivated fields have been destroyed, and accessing open areas during the war is dangerous in any case. Bakeries, factories and food warehouses have been bombed or shut down due to lack of basic supplies, fuel and electricity. Stockpiles in private homes, stores and warehouses have long since run out. In these conditions, the family and social support networks that helped residents at the beginning of the war collapsed, too. Yet Israel is deliberately denying the entry of enough food into Gaza to meet the population’s needs. Only a fraction of the amount of food entering before the war is allowed in, with limitations on the types of goods, how they are brought in and how they are distributed within Gaza.
For example, almost all goods enter through Rafah Crossing, a passenger crossing that is not equipped for massive commercial transports, limiting the number of truckloads getting through and creating a bottleneck. Although Israel recently allowed trucks in through Kerem Shalom Crossing, too, which is designed for commercial transports, this was merely a token addition that has failed to alleviate the hardship. Additionally, Israel forces aid organizations to purchase food from Egypt and prevents them from buying it in Israel, which would allow for a more efficient and rapid transfer of goods. Israel also prohibits the private sector in Gaza from purchasing food, which could significantly increase supply.
Aid organizations are struggling to operate under current conditions, and most of the limited aid allowed in remains in Rafah instead of reaching residents throughout the Strip. Martin Griffiths, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, listed several reasons why aid cannot be efficiently distributed. Among other things, he noted that trucks are inspected several times before Israel allows them into Gaza, and even then, long lines form due to the conditions at Rafah Crossing. The little food that does get in is very difficult to distribute due to the constant bombings, destroyed roads, frequent communication blackouts, and shelters overflowing with of hundreds of thousands of IDPs crowding into smaller and smaller areas.
Israel can, if it so chooses, change this reality. The images of children begging for food, people waiting in long lines for paltry handouts and hungry residents charging at aid trucks are already inconceivable. The horror is growing by the minute, and the danger of famine is real. Still, Israel persists in its policy.
Changing this policy is not just a moral obligation. Allowing food into the Gaza Strip is not an act of kindness but a positive obligation under international humanitarian law: starvation as a method of warfare is prohibited, and when a civilian population lacks what it needs to survive, parties to the conflict have a positive obligation to allow rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian aid – including food. These two rules are considered customary law and violating them constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
At least 1 in 4 households in the Gaza Strip, or more than half a million people, are facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity. CREDIT: Abed Zagout /UNICEF
In the dusty scrubland of the Gaza Strip, children hunt for eggplant in abandoned fields.
Many have gone days without food. Others have eaten nothing more than half a piece of pita bread or a can of beans, shared with several members of their family.
On the days when the aid trucks roll into the sprawling camps that have formed in southern Gaza, the same children can be seen jostling within crowds – buckets and pans in hand, pleading for food.
“We get one meal a day, it’s normally half a piece of pita bread,” says 13-year-old Ahmad as he waits for food in Rafah, alongside hundreds of others. “There are no ingredients to help us live our lives. We just want to live. My relatives are dying before my eyes.”
Ahmad, 5-years-old, waits his turn in the crowd to get a meal from a charitable hospice that distributes free food in the city of Rafah, southern the Gaza Strip. CREDIT: Abed Zagout/UNICEF
The UN has estimated that the entire 2.3 million Gazan population is now contending with ‘food insecurity,’ defined as unreliable access to sufficient and nutritious food to meet basic needs.
Of those, at least half a million are estimated to be facing ‘catastrophic conditions’ – the highest classified level of acute food insecurity – in which people experience “extreme food gaps and collapse of their livelihood”.
Humanitarian workers on the ground in Gaza say that many are regularly going up to three days without eating.
Naouar Libidi, a senior officer at the World Food Programme (WFP), stressed the “unique” nature of the food security crisis. “The fact that this is affecting the total population is unprecedented,” she said.
A Palestinian mother prepares dinner for her children in one of the asylum rooms in the city of Rafah. CREDIT: Eyad El Baba/UNICEF
Toddlers and babies are most at risk as they are especially dependent on food and nutrition to fuel their nascent physical and mental development.
Research suggests that without a sufficient energy supply in the first 1,000 days of life, the growth of a child can be impaired, causing irreversible physical and cognitive damage known as ‘stunting’.
With more than 135,000 children under two in the Strip, experts fear an entire generation is now at risk of the condition.
“If a child is malnourished, particularly under two years of age, they are unable to cognitively catch up with other [children]. The brain is such a big part of caloric and nutrient consumption in a child’s development,” said Anuradha Narayan, a senior nutrition adviser at Unicef.
“I dream of a future where I can live without the constant fear of being killed.” Rafah, 10, from the Gaza Strip. CREDIT: Eyad El Baba/UNICEF
“What each child has experienced today, in terms of hunger and malnutrition, is going to last a lifetime,” said Narayan.
Stunting can arise in babies and toddlers in a matter of months, if proper nutrition is not provided, and the WFP has warned that malnutrition rates “have changed dramatically in terms of magnitude, speed, and intensity” since the beginning of the war.
Dr Nasser Bulbul, head of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Shifa Hospital, but currently based at the European Gaza Hospital, said that hospital cases of severe child malnutrition were increasing “every day”.
“There is no nutritious food for them,” he said. “Poor children – they are turning into skeletons.”
The conflict has damaged or destroyed essential water, sanitation and health systems in the Gaza Strip, hindering the ability to treat severe malnutrition, while access to infant formula has been extremely difficult due to restrictions on aid flow.
Volunteers distribute food to people in the city of Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip. CREDIT: Abed Zagout/UNICEF
These groups should be a priority in the humanitarian response, yet, according to the UN, food delivery programmes in Gaza will only meet25 percent of the nutritional needs for malnourished children and vulnerable mothers in the next two months, leaving 375,000 individuals vulnerable.
Malnourished children are also more susceptible to disease, as nutritional deficiency exhausts the immune system.
Tess Ingram, a Unicef spokesperson, said that she was “incredibly worried” about the “lethal combination” of malnutrition and disease.
“There’s a deadly cycle that occurs. If a child is [both] sick and malnourished, they become more prone to disease and the likelihood of that child dying is so much higher than if they had just one of those challenges,” she explained.
There have been nearly 419,000 reported cases of infectious disease in the Gaza Strip from mid-October to 29 December, according to the World Health Organisation.
People, including children, wait in a long line to receive a small amount of food in the city of Rafah, southern Gaza Strip. CREDIT: Abed Zagout/UNICEF
Cases of diarrhoea in children under five rose from 48,000 to 71,000 in just one week, starting 17 December. Globally, diarrhoeal disease is the second biggest killer of this age group, and severely impacts a child’s ability to absorb nutrients, perpetuating the cycle.
Ingram said she has been increasingly receiving reports from her colleagues in Gaza of children appearing “visibly thin” with “obvious signs of disease”.
The origins of the unfolding humanitarian crisis stretch back to before October 7, when nearly two-thirds of Gazan households were already food insecure and 124,500 young children were in food poverty.
The population’s unemployment rate of 45 percent was one of the highest in the world, with 80 percent of the territory’s population dependent on international aid, according to a report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development.
Having teetered on the brink of catastrophe for years, the Israeli invasion pushed Gaza over the edge.
Shaima, 8-years-old, waits her turn in the crowd to get a meal from a charitable hospice that distributes free food in the city of Rafah, southern Gaza Strip. CREDIT: Abed Zagout/UNICEF
“We were already starting from a very low base and, of course, the war has severely compounded that situation,” said Tom White, director of the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
“It’s important that the current crisis is seen as part of the continuum of an Israeli policy to restrict access. It isn’t like we’ve flipped a switch for these issues of dietary requirement, starvation, famine. This is an accumulated problem.”
The aid blackout – which ran between October 7 and 21 – has proved especially ruinous. During this period, not a single truck of aid, many of them carrying food supplies and medical aid, entered Gaza.
Juliette Douma, director of communications at UNRWA, the largest aid organisation in the Strip, said the consequences were still being felt.
“There was a hermetic siege on the Gaza Strip which led to a backlog of 5,000 trucks that has never been replenished,” she added. “This siege is a silent killer of people.”
The flow of aid into the territory has slowly increased – 177 trucks entered Gaza last Thursday, up from 100 a day at the start of November – but it remains a trickle of what it was before the beginning of the war, when roughly 500 trucks were granted access on a daily basis.
A Palestinian man cooks food on wood fire due to gas shortages in UNRWA’s Daraj School, where displaced people reside after their homes were destroyed by bombardment. CREDIT: Omar Al-Qattaa/UNICEF
However, trucks that are given permission to enter will sometimes arrive at night, “when it’s very difficult for our colleagues to go to the borders in a sky full of airstrikes and then deliver the humanitarian assistance under fire,” added Douma.
Because of the limited deliveries, UNRWA workers are often forced to restrict their food distribution to one can of tuna and one bottle of water per family, as they “simply don’t have enough,” she said.
The high levels of food insecurity have started to take their toll. Despair and hysteria is beginning to take root.
“In some places, you can’t even get the aid convoy through that part of town before the vehicles are looted,” said White.
He described one recent raid in which hundreds, if not thousands, of people descended on a convoy in a frenzy. Young boys scaled the trucks and frantically scrambled for bags of flour, as high energy biscuits were thrown into the crowds.
“People are that short of food, that they’re taking matters into their own hands,” said White.
Haleema, 42 serves food for her children in the UNRWA Al-Shati School in the Gaza Strip. CREDIT: Hassan Islyeh/UNICEF
“As we’re driving around, all the kids are increasingly gesturing with a hand gesture to the mouth indicating that they want food,” he added. “It used to be that they wanted water. Now they’re hungry.”
Amid the ongoing Israeli offensive, which makes delivering aid to certain areas of Gaza near impossible, humanitarian organisations are doing what they can to support the population’s needy.
The WFP is providing food from community-led kitchens every day; in December, an estimated 80,000 people received hot meals in 47 locations across Gaza.
UNRWA’s flour distribution operation had meanwhile reached more than 1 million people, including 75,000 families outside shelters, by December 10.
High nutrition supplements are being handed out to breastfeeding women and children in shelters in Rafah, with therapeutic milk supplies provided to acutely malnourished children.
Yet such provisions are simply not enough. Despite the best efforts of the humanitarian community, daily food assistance in the last week of December reached only eight percent of the targeted people in need.
“We’re not sitting on our hands, but at the same time, we’re just not meeting the demand,” said White.
A Palestinian child helps his family to cook food on one of the streets in a refugee camp located in Rafah city- south of the Gaza Strip. CREDIT: Eyad El Baba/UNICEF
As the crisis intensifies, with no immediate end to the fighting in sight, the spectre of famine is now beginning to loom large over Gaza. The UN says that 40 percent of its population is currently “at risk”.
Yet famine is a highly technical specification that experts are hesitant to declare.
It occurs when an area has at least 20 percent of households facing an extreme lack of food, at least 30 percent of children suffering from acute malnutrition, and two people – or four children – for every 10,000 dying each day due to outright starvation or the interaction of malnutrition and disease.
There have only been two instances of famine in the last decade: in Somalia in 2011 and South Sudan in 2017.
Libidi, however, thinks it’s only a matter of time before famine is officially declared in Gaza.
“According to the analysis, the risk of famine increases each day as the current conflict continues and restricted humanitarian access persists.”
If famine does come to pass, it won’t just be the children of Gaza who pay the price, but every living soul in the territory.
FILE – Newly arrived Somalis, displaced by a drought, receive food distributions at makeshift camps in the Tabelaha area on the outskirts of Mogadishu, Somalia on March 30, 2017. The United Nations says at least three of every four Africans can’t afford a healthy diet because of an “unprecedented food… (Associated Press)
ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — At least three-fourths of Africans can’t afford a healthy diet, and a fifth are undernourished due to an “unprecedented food crisis,” United Nations agencies said in a report released Thursday with the African Union Commission.
It warned that “millions are expected to be at risk of worsening hunger in the near future.”
With a young population set to double by 2050, Africa is the only rapidly growing region where people are getting poorer, and some are beginning to celebrate coups by soldiers who promise a better life. Despite its wealth of natural resources, Africa is far from meeting its commitment to end hunger and all forms of malnutrition by 2025.
“The majority of Africa’s population — about 78% or more than one billion people — remain unable to afford a healthy diet, compared with 42% at the global level, and the number is rising,” said the report from the Food and Agriculture Organization, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, the World Food Program and the African Union Commission.
In 2022, as many as 342 million Africans were “severely food-insecure,” the report said. That represented 38% of the 735 million hungry people around the world, it said.
Among those affected the most by the food crisis in Africa are children under age 5, 30% of whom are stunted because of malnutrition, the report said.
“The deterioration of the food security situation and the lack of progress towards the WHO global nutrition targets make it imperative for countries to step up their efforts if they are to achieve a world without hunger and malnutrition by 2030,” Abebe Haile-Gabriel, FAO regional representative for Africa, said alongside officials from the other agencies.
The agencies noted he continent is still reeling from the impacts of COVID-19. They said 57 million more Africans have become undernourished since the start of the pandemic, bringing the total of the undernourished to nearly 282 million last year.
“After a long period of improvement between 2000 and 2010, hunger has worsened substantially and most of this deterioration occurred between 2019 and 2022” during the pandemic, the report said.
In Nigeria, which is Africa’s largest economy and a top oil producer, nearly 93% of the country’s more than 210 million people are unable to afford a healthy diet, the report said.
Such situations are leading many to question why Africa’s governments are failing to use the continent’s wealth to make life better for citizens.
While Nigeria has been battling growing hardship as a result of austerity measures introduced by the nation’s new leader, the government budgeted millions of dollars for cars and house renovations for the president and his wife — even though her office is not recognized by the country’s constitution.
“We hope the findings will trigger the momentum for agrifood systems transformation along with other systems such as education, health and energy, for better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life for all,” the U.N. agencies said.
According to the Iranian regime’s Statistical Center, the point-to-point inflation rate of “food and beverage” group increased in November.
According to the report, among food items, red meat had a point-to-point inflation rate of over 82 percent, followed by various types of fish with a record inflation rate of 72.4 percent, making it the highest inflation rate among food items in the second month of autumn.
Point-to-point inflation refers to the percentage change in the price index compared to the same month of the previous year.
The 39.2-percent point-to-point inflation rate for households in the country means that, on average, households have spent 39.2 percent more than November of last year to purchase a “basket of goods and services.”
The report also indicates that the point-to-point inflation rate for food and beverages increased from 36.2 percent in October to 36.4 percent in November.
The Statistical Center of Iran also announced that the point-to-point inflation rate for food and beverage in urban areas during November was 36.7 percent, which increased by 0.3 percent compared to October.
In the report, the point-to-point inflation rate for the whole country in November was announced as 39.2 percent, which showed no change compared to October and indicated a halt in the downward trend of point-to-point inflation rate.
Monthly inflation in the food and beverage group doubled in November compared to October.
Accordingly, monthly inflation increased from 0.5 percent in October to 1 percent in November.
The Statistical Center stated in the report that the monthly inflation rate for the food group in urban areas during November increased from 0.3 percent to 0.7 percent.
The center announced the monthly inflation rate for the whole country in November as 2.3 percent and the annual inflation rate as 44.9 percent.
The annual inflation rate for the food and beverage group in the Statistical Center’s report for November was also announced as 52.2 percent, which decreased by 2.8 percent compared to the previous month.
The price increases have also affected other sectors of the country’s economy.
For example, in late October, the Statistical Center of Iran, after months of suspending the publicationof government statistics on the housing situation, reported that house prices in Tehran had increased by 75 percent in September of this year compared to the same month last year.
The suspension of housing statistics by the Statistical Center and the Central Bank has been in effect since last winter, while the Statistical Center’s report shows that in the past winter, the growth rate of housing prices suddenly intensified, and even in May, housing inflation reached 120 percent.
In August of this year, housing inflation was also above 84 percent.
Poorer nations will be dependent on Moscow’s good graces for shipments of food and fertilizer.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said his government would “refuse to extend” the Black Sea grain deal | Pool photo by Pavel Bednyakov via AFP/Getty Images
Russia will not rejoin a U.N.-brokered pact designed to prevent famines across the developing world as a result of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday.
Speaking at the Russia-Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum in St. Petersburg, Putin again said his government would “refuse to extend” the Black Sea grain deal, which has allowed 32.9 million tons of agricultural products to leave Ukraine’s blockaded ports and reach the global market.
“In the coming three or four months we would be ready to provide to Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, the Central African Republic and Eritrea up to 50,000 tons of grain each. We will ensure free shipping of these cargo,” he went on.
Investigations have shown Russia has systematically stolen Ukrainian grain during its occupation of the south of the country and, following Moscow’s withdrawal from the deal, the country’s forces launched strikes against agricultural stores. Kyiv says as much as 60,000 tons of grain were destroyed.
The African Union earlier Thursday urged Moscowto reinstate the Black Sea grain deal, designed to ensure Ukrainian and Russian agricultural products can reach the global market, despite the raging war affecting Black Sea shipping routes, and avoid shortages.
“The problem of grains and fertilizers concerns everyone,” Comoros President Azali Assoumani, who heads the 55-member African Union, told Russian state media. “We will talk about this in St. Petersburg, we will discuss it with Putin to see how we can restart this agreement.”
Putin last week announced his country would unilaterally pull out of the arrangement and, shortly afterward, his forces launched strikes against Ukraine’s export infrastructure.
Analysts have previously warned that a continued refusal to renew the deal could mean African nations are dependent on one-off deals with Moscow to secure supplies, with price volatility and insecurity of supply as a result.
Billed as an effort to foster closer relations between Russia and the Global South, the summit has been overshadowed by strict security and COVID-19 testing requirements, and the Kremlin has complained that “pressure” from the the U.S. and EU countries has meant only 17 heads of state out of a total of more than 50 African countries confirmed they would attend.
Hundreds of millions of people are going hungry as conflicts affect food supplies. There is also growing evidence that food producers are exploiting the situation to increase their profits.
Around 200 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity. They include some in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mali, Sudan and Syria, countries that have something else in common: each is experiencing a deadly conflict. These two situations — hunger and conflict — are connected.
In a report presented to the United Nations in March, the organization’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, said that violence and conflict are in fact the primary causes of hunger worldwide. They are also pivotal reasons that the world is not on track to end hunger and malnutrition by 2030, a promise made by world leaders at a UN summit in 2015, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
This is alarming for a number of reasons. For one thing, it suggests that, unless something is done, we are abandoning hundreds of millions of people to severe hunger. Furthermore, crucial efforts to study and implement policies to end hunger are hampered when violence breaks out.
In September, heads of government will meet in New York City to work out what can be done. Although the meeting takes a place at a time of great tension between world powers, attendees must accept that the SDG to end hunger will not be met unless violence is reduced — or, at the very least, unless parties to conflict stop weaponizing food.
Fakhri’s report draws on decades of studies, as well as newer data from bodies including the UN’s World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. The report describes the relationship between violence in various forms, including sexual and gender-based violence, and food insecurity. Conflicts endanger food security when, for example, crops are destroyed or food supplies are disrupted — things that have happened, and continue to happen, in wars from Mali to Myanmar. Coercive measures, such as international economic sanctions against warring countries, also contribute to hunger. The evidence, according to the report, is that ‘targeted’ sanctions disrupt food systems, too.
The UN special rapporteur’s report also brings home how global economic events are exacerbating hunger and food insecurity. Food prices have rocketed in most places, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In the rich countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, food-price inflation dropped to around 12% on average in April, but it remains much higher in a number of LMICs — 81% in Lebanon, 27% in Egypt and 30.5% in Zimbabwe, according to World Bank data published last month. That is down to factors such as the COVID‑19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war affected the global supply of staple crops — before the invasion, Russia and Ukraine together grew one-third of the world’s wheat. The global spike in energy prices is also affecting the ability of the poorest families to use gas and other fuels for cooking.
But researchers are reporting that food inflation is also partly caused by producers, especially large firms, putting up prices to increase their profits. Sellers can do this if they know that a buyer has no choice but to pay more to obtain things they cannot do without, such as food and fuel — a phenomenon that researchers call sellers’ inflation. That might be one reason that inflation remains stubbornly high, especially when it comes to food, and that interventions such as raising interest rates have failed to reduce it.
Weber’s work is sparking change among some governments and getting attention from financial institutions. The International Monetary Fund found last month that corporate profits accounted for nearly half of inflation in the euro area last year (N.-J. H. Hansen et al. IMF Working Paper No. 2023/131; 2023).
Weber is among those advocating that governments put a ceiling on some of the prices that producers can charge. However, many academic economists — and the governments they advise — disagree, saying that such price controls distort markets. The poorest people are caught in the middle of this argument, experiencing harm as a result of both high prices and policy delays.
It’s important for researchers to continue to uncover evidence about what is exacerbating hunger and how it can be eliminated. More could, for example, study how conflicts affect hunger on a more granular level. They could analyse the components of inflation not only in Europe and the United States, but in LMICs, too. Economist Amartya Sen demonstrated in his 1981 book Poverty and Famines that hunger and famine are not necessarily the result of food shortages, but created by the actions and choices of people. Leaders could make good on their SDG pledge that hunger and malnutrition must end, or they could continue to target food in conflicts. Both are choices, as Fakhri says, and not predetermined outcomes.
Russia has ceased a wartime deal that allowed for the safe export of grain from Ukraine to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, where growing food prices have led to mass hunger and increased poverty rates. Per the Associated Press, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would suspend its participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative until its demands to get its own food and fertilizer to the world are met. Once those demands are satisfied, Peskov said Russia would “immediately return to the implementation of the deal.”
Brokered by the United Nations and Turkey last July, the deal allowed grain shipments from Ukraine to leave the Black Sea region following Russia’s 2022 invasion, which further exacerbated a global food crisis. Both Ukraine and Russia are prominent suppliers of wheat, barley, sunflower oil and other affordable, in-demand food products. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said this month that 45 countries need outside food assistance, with high local food prices “a driver of worrying levels of hunger” in those places, according to the AP.
Under the Black Sea Grain Initiative, nearly 33 million metric tons of corn, wheat and other grains have been exported by Ukraine, per the Joint Coordination Center in Istanbul. The suspension of the deal has already hiked up wheat prices — analysts also said finding suppliers outside Ukraine that are further away could add to those rising costs.
The number of people going hungry in the world has risen by 122 million to 735 million since 2019 because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the UN has said.
If current trends continue, almost 600 million people will be chronically undernourished by 2030 – about 119 million more than if neither of these events had happened, a new report has found.
While the numbers of people facing hunger globally have stabilised after increasing sharply from 2019 to 2020, hunger is still on the rise in western Asia, the Caribbean and across Africa, according to the report released by the Food and Agriculture Organiszation (FAO) and four other UN bodies on Wednesday.
“Recovery from the global pandemic has been uneven, and the war in Ukraine has affected diets,” said Qu Dongyu, the FAO director general. “This is the ‘new normal’ where climate change, conflict and economic instability are pushing those on the margins even further from safety.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a major producer of wheat, maize and sunflower oil, has led to a steep rise in food prices globally, and while the FAO’s food price index has fallen, the impacts are still being felt.
People receive food aid in Hyderabad, Pakistan, last month. Pakistan is one of the countries that has been named as a ‘hunger hotspot’ by the UN. Photograph: Nadeem Khawar/EPA
The 2023 edition of the annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report shows a world gripped by a widespread and urgent food crisis.
In 2022, an estimated 900 million people – or 11.3% of the global population – were suffering from severe food insecurity, defined as when a person has run out of food or has gone an entire day without eating during the year.
Nearly one in three people – 2.4 billion, or 29.6% of the world’s population– did not have constant access to food, the report found.
Millions of children continue to be malnourished: in 2022, 45 million children under five were suffering from wasting, the deadliest form of malnutrition, and 148 million children of the same age had stunted growth and development.
Maximo Torero, chief economist at the FAO and the main author of the report, warned that although the climate crisis had not affected hunger levels in 2022 as much as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, it would have “a severe impact over time”.
Torero said the global food system was plagued by “significant risks and uncertainties” and was “very vulnerable”. Very few countries in the world exported cereals, for example, and if anything were to happen to them in terms of a climate shock, food prices would rise, he said.
“Climate change is a constant problem, a constant vulnerability of the system, because of how concentrated exporting production countries are,” he said.
Pauline Chetcuti, policy lead at Oxfam, said: “It is unforgivable for governments to watch billions of people going hungry in a world of plenty. While food and energy companies more than doubled their profits last year, nearly a third of the world’s population were moderately or severely food insecure.”
Countries in west Africa are seeing a dangerous rise in people without enough food due to the effects of the climate crisis as well as regional conflict, and food prices skyrocketing following Covid and the war in Ukraine, according to the British Red Cross.
“In Nigeria, the number of people facing severe food shortages has doubled in the last two years alone,” said Alex Wade, senior disaster-management coordinator at the British Red Cross.
“An important driver of this has been climate change, which made the devastating floods last year far more likely, destroying crops and further driving up food prices.”
The 2023 edition of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report was published jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, Unicef, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization.
In this Saturday, May 8, 2021, photo, an Ethiopian woman scoops up grains of wheat after it was distributed by the Relief Society of Tigray in the town of Agula, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. As the United States warns that up to 900,000 people in Tigray face famine conditions in the world’s… (Associated Press)
By FRANCES D’EMILIO and EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press4 hours, 38 minutes ago
ROME (AP) — The United Nations on Monday lamented a “dramatic worsening” of world hunger last year, saying much of that is likely connected to the pandemic, and it urged billions of dollars to save millions of people from starving.
It said the sharpest rise in hunger came in Africa, where 21% of the people — 282 million — are estimated to be undernourished.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the new “tragic data” shows that between 720 million and 811 million people in the world faced hunger last year — as many as 161 million more than in 2019.
More than 2.3 billion people, which represents 30% of the global population, lacked year-round access to adequate food, according to the report. This indicator, known as the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity, leaped in one year as much as in the five previous years combined.
“Despite a 300% increase in global food production since the mid-1960s, malnutrition is a leading factor contributing to reduced life expectancy,” the U.N. chief said. “In a world of plenty, we have no excuse for billions of people to lack access to a healthy diet. This is unacceptable.”
Emily Farr of the humanitarian organization Oxfam said the pandemic was the last straw for millions of people already battered by the impacts of conflict, economic shocks and a worsening climate crisis.
Children paid a high price, with 149 million of those younger than 5 estimated to have stunted growth since they are too short for their age, and more than 45 million children are too thin for their height, the report said. It also noted the paradoxical problem of nearly 39 million children being overweight.
“In many parts of the world, the pandemic has triggered brutal recessions and jeopardized access to food,? the United Nations said in a summary of its findings. ”Yet even before the pandemic, hunger was spreading; progress on malnutrition lagged.”
“Disturbingly, in 2020 hunger shot up in both absolute and proportional terms, outpacing population growth,” the report’s authors concluded. The report said some 9.9% of the world’s people were estimated to have been undernourished last year, compared to 8.4% in 2019.
Geographically, in addition to the surge of Africans facing hunger, more than half the undernourished people — 418 million — live in Asia, while 60 million live in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the report.
Oxfam’s Farr said the new figures “are a somber reminder of how broken our global food and economic systems are.”
“More than half the world’s population did not have social protection to cope with the adverse effects of the pandemic,” she said. “Small farmers were forced to watch their crops rot during the pandemic, even when global food prices rose by 40%, while the biggest food companies have amassed over $10 billion of additional revenues last year.”
The United Nations said the pandemic undercut a key U.N. goal of achieving zero hunger by 2030. Based on current trends, it estimates that the goal will be “missed by a margin of nearly 660 million people,” and that some 30 million of that figure “may be linked to the pandemic’s lasting effects.”
Guterres said he is convening a global Food Systems Summit during this September’s annual meeting of world leaders at the General Assembly “to urgently make a change.” He said a pre-summit meeting in Rome at the end of this month is to work out “how we must address hunger, the climate emergency, incredible inequality and conflict, by transforming our food systems.”
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report was prepared by U.N. agencies including the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Program and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. The other two agencies were the the United Nations Children’s Fund, commonly known as UNICEF, which is based in New York, and the World Health Organization, or WHO, headquartered in Geneva.
Among the U.N.’s recommendations was one calling for strengthening “the resilience of the most vulnerable to economic adversity,” such as through programs to lessen the impact “pandemic-style shocks” or steep food price increases.
Maximo Torero, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s chief economist, said removing 100 million people from chronic undernourishment would require an additional $14 billion a year until 2030 — and to achieve the goal of zero hunger by 2030 “we were talking about $40 billion.”
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