United Nations stated that over 735 million people worldwide endured chronic hunger in 2022, a statistic that is significantly higher than before the COVID-19 epidemic and threatens progress toward a global objective of ending hunger by 2030. The United Nations said in its annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report that a multi-year upward trend in hunger rates leveled off last year as many countries recovered economically from the pandemic, but the war in Ukraine and its pressure on food and energy prices offset some of those gains.
As a result, an estimated 122 million more people will be hungry in 2022 than in 2019, and the globe would be “far off track” to fulfill the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal of ending hunger by 2030, according to the analysis. According to the estimate, 600 million people will be undernourished by 2030. “We are seeing that hunger is stabilizing at a high level, which is bad news,” said Maximo Torero Cullen, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) senior economist, in an interview with Reuters.
Conflict, climate change, and economic struggles drive global hunger
According to the research, the main drivers of global hunger in recent years have been conflict-related disruption of livelihoods, climate extremes that impacted agricultural productivity, and economic hardship compounded by the pandemic. Hunger has decreased in certain parts of the world, notably South America and most Asian regions. However, hunger is on the rise in the Caribbean, Western Asia, and Africa.
To reverse the trend, states must combine humanitarian relief with efforts to rebuild local food supply chains, according to Kevin Mugenya, food systems director for Mercy Corps, an international aid organization, in an interview with Reuters. “Countries need to have localized solutions,” he says. The International Fund for Agricultural Development, the Children’s Fund, the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, and FAO collaborated on the report.