Action Against Hunger warns of a “perfect storm” of hunger, with the Sahel in its worst crisis in ten years

July 7. (EUROPA PRESS) –

The non-governmental organization Action Against Hunger has warned this Thursday that “the perfect storm” of hunger is forming due to the sum of factors such as the coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the effects of the increase in prices of food and extreme weather events.

Some 768 million people suffer from hunger around the world, according to a new United Nations report published on Wednesday, which warns that the figure has skyrocketed by 150 million compared to statistics collected before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19.

“There are three areas where all the indicators are shot: the Middle East, Africa and even Latin America, because the price of food is unaffordable for most and they have already exhausted their reserves after the blow caused by COVID-19 in countries without a system. of social protection”, explained the director general of the NGO, Olivier Longué.

“We must remember that the food crisis was served before the conflict in Ukraine”, Longué highlighted. “COVID-19, climate change and the crisis in Yemen and Lebanon were already there, so we had a critical situation before the February conflict, something that we were already denouncing as an absolute crisis situation,” he said.

In this sense, he has emphasized that “the big problem that comes with Ukraine is not so much the lack of food, but the rise in the price of food and the economic capacity to buy it.” “If we don’t act now, the ‘Zero Hunger’ objective of the Sustainable Development Goals will not only not be achieved by 2030, but we will move further and further away from its fulfillment,” she stressed.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) published on Wednesday shows that the goal of zero hunger in 2030 is increasingly distant, with constant increases in food insecurity that threaten to go further in the coming months due to the collateral effects of crises such as the war in Ukraine.

The estimates in this document keep the number of hungry people in a range of between 702 and 828 million, with the aim of reflecting the uncertainties associated mainly with the COVID-19 pandemic, for which it establishes the midpoint of 768 as a reference millions.