The Covid-19 pandemic is thrusting populations around the world deeper into a hunger crisis. The United Nations last month said that an estimated 132 million people will have no sufficient food this year due to the effects of the pandemic.
“World hunger is still increasing—up by 10 million people in one year and 60 million in five years,” said Maximo Torero Cullen, chief economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which is one of the UN agencies that compiled the report on world hunger. “Over 2 billion people do not have regular access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food,” he added. Of that number, about 746 million are severely food insecure and 1.25 billion are moderately food insecure.
The leaders of four international agencies—the World Health Organization, Unicef, the World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization—have called for at least $2.4 billion immediately to address global hunger.
Oxfam noted in July that the pandemic is deepening the hunger crisis in the world’s hunger hot spots and creating new epicenters of hunger across the globe. By the end of the year, it said 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to Covid-19. The pandemic is the final straw for millions of people already struggling with the impacts of conflict, climate change, inequality and a broken food system that has impoverished millions of food producers and workers. Meanwhile, Oxfam said those at the top are continuing to make a profit: eight of the biggest food and drink companies paid out over $18 billion to shareholders since January, even as the pandemic was spreading across the globe—an amount 10 times more than has been requested in the UN Covid-19 appeal to stop people going hungry.
“This is a critical time,” said David Beasley, the head of the World Food Program. “Nations must step up and reach deep in their pockets or we are going to have mass starvation and other significant issues.”
Although mass starvation is mostly prevalent in poor countries, it’s also a problem in rich countries.
In the United States, food waste is estimated at 30 percent to 40 percent of the food supply. The US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service cited a 31 percent food loss at the retail and consumer levels, or approximately $161 billion worth of food in 2010. There should be food for all Americans. Ironically, that’s not the case.
From Bloomberg news: “Food insecurity for US households last week reached its highest reported level since the Census Bureau started tracking the data in May, with almost 30 million Americans reporting that they’d not had enough to eat at some point in the seven days through July 21, 2020. In the bureau’s weekly Household Pulse Survey, roughly 23.9 million of 249 million respondents indicated they had “sometimes not enough to eat” for the week ended July 21, while about 5.42 million indicated they had “often not enough to eat.”
From the Borgen Project: “The Philippines’ Global Hunger Index is currently 20.3, ranking the country at 69 out of 119 countries and placing it under the “serious” category in the Global Hunger Index. Hunger poses dangerous health consequences for the Philippines, with 20.6 percent of people being underweight and 32.2 percent being stunted.”
The UN says enough food is produced today to feed everyone on the planet, but hunger is on the rise in all parts of the world. Food is a basic human need. Despite the current pandemic, governments must find ways to ensure that their citizens have the food they need to live a healthy and productive life. Only healthy citizens can effectively help in nation building.
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