World hunger in 2021 reached 828 million people, an increase of 46 million from 2020 and 150 million since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: FAO.

By Mario Lubetkin
ROME, Jul 13 2022 (IPS)

The signs of the last few years indicate a continuous setback towards achieving food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (FAO) annual report, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI)”, prepared together with other UN agencies and presented on July 6th leaves no doubt about the dangerous situation in which we find ourselves regarding the real possibilities of eliminating hunger and poverty by 2030, as solemnly proposed by the international community in October 2015 in New York.

According to the latest SOFI data, world hunger in 2021 reached 828 million people, an increase of 46 million from 2020 and 150 million since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, showing that hunger has skyrocketed in 2020, after five years of no change or slight improvements. In 2019, the global population suffering from hunger was 8% of the world population, in 2020 it was 9.3% and in 2021 it reached 9.8%.

In 2021, nearly 2.3 billion people were moderately or severely food insecure that is, 350 million more than those who suffered from it before COVID-19. Likewise, around 924 million people, representing 11.7% of the world's population, faced severe levels of food insecurity, a figure that increased by 207 million in just two years

Looking into the future, the report projects that at this rate, even with a global economic recovery, around 670 million people will go hungry, or 8% of the world’s population. This is the same percentage as in 2015 when more than 150 heads of state and government adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to eliminate hunger and poverty worldwide by 2030!

Experts remind us that, in 2021, nearly 2.3 billion people were moderately or severely food insecure that is, 350 million more than those who suffered from it before COVID-19.

Likewise, around 924 million people, representing 11.7% of the world’s population, faced severe levels of food insecurity, a figure that increased by 207 million in just two years. Moreover, the gender gap continued to widen, with women accounting for 31.9% of these dramatic figures, while men accounted for 27.6%.

In 2020, nearly 3.1 billion people could not afford to maintain a healthy diet, 112 million more than in 2019, reflecting the consumer consequences of the effects of food price inflation stemming from the economic implications of COVID-19.

This is without calculating the impact of the war in Ukraine involving two of the world’s main producers of basic grains, oilseeds and fertilizers, and other conflicts around the world.

Clearly, this is disrupting the international supply chains and driving up the price of grains, fertilizers and energy, as well as ready-to-eat therapeutic foods for the treatment of severe malnutrition in children.

An estimated 45 million children under the age of five suffer from wasting. This is one of the deadliest forms of malnutrition that increases the risk of child mortality 12-fold. Meanwhile, 149 million children of the same age suffer from stunted growth and development due to a chronic lack of nutrients necessary for a healthy diet, and another 39 million are overweight, all aspects that will undoubtedly affect the future development of our societies.

One way to contribute to economic recovery when faced with the danger of a global recession with its direct consequences on public income and spending, is to adapt the forms of support for food and agriculture, which between 2013 and 2018 was 630,000 million dollars, and allocate them to nutritious foods where per capita consumption still falls short of the recommended levels for a healthy diet.

The SOFI report suggests that if governments were to adapt the resources they are using to encourage the production, supply and consumption of nutritious food, they would contribute to making healthy diets less expensive, more affordable and equitable for all people.

FAO, through its Director-General Qu Dongyu, insists that, in this complex situation, aggravated by war and climatic factors, investment in countries affected by rising food prices should increase, especially by supporting local production of nutritious food.

Currently, only 8% of all food security funding under emergency aid goes to support agricultural production.

In addition, information tools must be improved to enable better analysis and decision-making on food security and nutrition, in particular by using the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC), which can be a key factor in global responses to hunger.

Specialists say that policies aimed at increasing the productivity, efficiency, resilience and inclusion of agrifood systems should be promoted.

For this to happen, a financial investment equivalent to 8% of the volume of the agrifood market would be advisable, and these investments should focus on value chain infrastructure, innovation, new technologies and inclusive digital infrastructure.

Reducing food loss and waste could feed an additional 1.26 billion people a year, including enough fruit and vegetables for everyone.

In parallel, it would be advisable to ensure a better and more efficient use of available fertilizers for a better adaptation to local agricultural systems, maintaining market transparency, using tools such as the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS), which is important for building confidence in world markets, while seeking to stabilize prices, preserving the open world trade system.

The solutions exist, but we must act before it is too late.

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Sep 19 2014 (IPS)

At the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), heads of government and the international community committed themselves to reducing the number of hungry people in the world by half. Five years later, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) lowered this level of ambition by only seeking to halve the proportion of the hungry.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The latest State of World Food Insecurity (SOFI) report for 2014 by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates that 805 million people – one in nine people worldwide – remain chronically hungry: 789 million are in developing countries where this share has declined from 23.4 to 13.5 percent.

By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015.

Some 25 countries have made more impressive progress, achieving the more ambitious WFS target of halving the number of hungry. However, the number of hungry people in the world has only declined by one-fifth from the billion estimated for 1990-92.

Major effort needed

The proportion of undernourished people – those regularly not able to consume enough food for an active and healthy life – has decreased from 23.4 percent in 1990–1992 to 13.5 percent in 2012–2014. This is significant because a large and growing number of countries show that achieving and sustaining rapid progress in reducing hunger is feasible.

However, the MDG target of halving the chronically undernourished people’s share of the world’s population by the end of 2015 cannot be met at the current rate of progress. Meeting the target is still possible, however, with a sufficient, immediate additional effort to accelerate progress, especially in countries which have showed little progress so far.

Progress uneven

“By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015”
Overall progress has been highly uneven. All but 14 million of the world’s hungry live in developing countries. Some countries and regions have seen only slow progress in reducing hunger, while the absolute number of hungry has even increased in several cases. While sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of the chronically hungry, almost one in four, South Asia has the highest number, with over half a billion undernourished.

Marked differences in reducing undernourishment have persisted across regions. There have been significant reductions in both the estimated share and number of undernourished in most countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean – where the MDG target of halving the hunger rate has been reached, or nearly reached.

West Asia has seen a rise in the share of the hungry compared with 1990–1992, while progress in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Oceania has not been sufficient to meet the MDG hunger target by 2015.

In several countries, underweight and stunting persist in children, even when undernourishment is low and most people have access to sufficient food. Such nutrition failures are due not only to insufficient food access, but also to poor health conditions and the high incidence of diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

Food security and nutrition

Hunger is conventionally measured in terms of the prevalence of undernourishment, the FAO estimate of chronic inadequacy of dietary energy. While such a measure is useful for estimating hunger, it needs to be complemented by more measures to capture other dimensions of food security.

SOFI’s suite of indicators measures different dimensions of food security. Information thus generated can guide priority policy actions. For example, in countries where low undernourishment coexists with high malnutrition, specially-designed nutrition-enhancing interventions may be crucial to address early childhood stunting.

With the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals likely to seek to overcome hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, FAO has recently developed and tested a new Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) in over 150 countries to measure the severity of reported food insecurity.

Lessons

Improvements in nutrition generally require complementary policies, including improving health conditions, hygiene, water supply and education. More sophisticated and creative approaches to coordination and governance are needed, with more, and more effective, resources to end hunger and malnutrition in our lifetimes.

With high levels of deprivation, unemployment and underemployment continuing and likely to prevail in the world in the foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome without universalising social protection to all in need, but also to provide the means for future livelihoods and resilience.

The forthcoming Second International Conference of Nutrition in Rome on November 19-21 is expected to articulate coherent bases for accelerated progress to overcome undernutrition as well as for greater international cooperation and support for enhanced and more integrated national nutrition efforts.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

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