Anti-poverty organization Oxfam says 11 people die of hunger around the world every minute. In a report dubbed “The Hunger Virus Multiplies,” Oxfam said the death toll from famine outpaces that of Covid-19, which kills seven people per minute.
“The statistics are staggering, but we must remember that these figures are made up of people facing unimaginable suffering. Even one person [dying] is too many,” said Oxfam America President and CEO Abby Maxman.
Oxfam said 155 million people around the world are living in crisis levels of food insecurity or worse—that is 20 million more than last year. Around two-thirds of them are going hungry primarily because their country is in military conflict.
A recent United Nations report—The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World—said more than 2.3 billion people, which represents 30 percent of the global population, lacked year-round access to adequate food.
Jointly published by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the UN World Food Program, and the World Health Organization, the report said the sharpest rise in hunger came in Africa, where 21 percent of the people, or about 282 million are undernourished.
UN 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, which is 161 million more than in 2019.
“Despite a 300 percent increase in global food production since the mid-1960s, malnutrition is a leading factor contributing to reduced life expectancy,” the UN 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.”
Oxfam said the new figures show a broken global food and economic systems. Emily Farr, Oxfam’s food security adviser, 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.
“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 percent, while the biggest food companies have amassed over $10 billion of additional revenues last year.”
On top of the surge in the number of Africans facing hunger, the report said more than half the undernourished people, or around 418 million, live in Asia, while 60 million live in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The United Nations said the pandemic undercut the UN goal of achieving zero hunger by 2030. Based on current trends, the agency 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.”
In the Philippines, the national government pledged to step up efforts to eradicate hunger following a survey that showed 49 percent of Filipinos rated themselves poor, according to Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles, who acknowledged the results of the national Social Weather Survey of April 28 to May 2, 2021.
Nograles, who is also chair of the Inter-Agency Task Force on Zero Hunger, said the figures were expected given the limitations in livelihood as a result of the prevailing pandemic restrictions.
It is worthy to note, however, that the formation of the Zero Hunger task force and the efforts by the Department of Agriculture to improve local food production “may have had a positive impact and may have helped prevent self-rated food poverty numbers in 2020 from increasing due to the pandemic lockdowns,” according to Nograles.
The task force, he said, is mandated to ensure that government policies, initiatives, and projects on attaining zero hunger will be “coordinated, responsive, and effective.”
To achieve zero hunger in the Philippines by 2030, there should be a 25-percent reduction in hunger incidence every two and a half years.
As the Duterte administration is already winding up its affairs, the next administration must prioritize this program if we want to attain zero hunger in our country.