Global hunger has surged since before the COVID-19 pandemic, with about 122 million more people struggling from a lack of food in 2022 compared to 2019, according to an annual report from the United Nations.
Without major changes, the U.N. will not meet its goal of eradicating global hunger by 2030, the report warned.
Based on the current trajectory, some 600 million people around the world will still be suffering from hunger in 2030 unless global efforts are “scaled up” and “sped up,” said the president of the U.N.’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, Alvaro Lario. “I think there’s a possibility of reducing those figures massively, if we manage to increase investment in food systems in a significant way,” he told POLITICO in an interview ahead of the report’s launch.
The latest report reveals the sweeping impacts of supply chain disruptions during the pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine. Around 735 million people struggled with hunger last year, compared to 613 million in 2019, according to the report.
High prices for fertilizer and other inputs cut into farmers’ production while extreme weather due to climate change simultaneously limited agricultural production. With just days until the Black Sea grain deal expires, potentially choking off access to Ukraine’s agricultural bounty, world food leaders are confronting what they’re calling a “new normal.”
“There are rays of hope, some regions are on track to achieve some 2030 nutrition targets. But overall, we need an intense and immediate global effort to rescue the Sustainable Development Goals. We must build resilience against the crises and shocks that drive food insecurity-from conflict to climate,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement.
Details
Hunger plateaued between 2021 and 2022, failing to reverse the overall trend of increasing hunger dating to before the pandemic. In the Caribbean, western Asia and all subregions of Africa, hunger worsened in 2022. The report also showed that nearly 30 percent of the global population, or 2.4 billion people, lacked constant access to food, one metric of food insecurity. And 42 percent of the world’s population could not afford a healthy diet in 2021. Millions of children are also facing malnutrition — causing stunted growth and other poor health outcomes.
A major factor is food inflation. The cost of a healthy diet rose nearly 7 percent between 2019 and 2021.
“The scale of the nutrition crisis demands a much stronger response focused on children,” said Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N.’s World Food Program.
In addition to a humanitarian response, a full-scale transformation of global food systems is needed to reverse the current trends, said IFAD’s Lario.
Food aid is needed in order to save lives, yet “that’s something that will manage the situation but will not transform the situation,” he said, calling for a massive mobilization of funds for rural development and local agri-food systems — “whether it’s from official development assistance, from remittances, from local private systems, from governments.”
Challenges and opportunities
Rapid urbanization is driving changes in agri-food systems, creating both challenges and opportunities regarding healthy diets, according to the report, which looked at new evidence around urbanization.
The rural-urban divide is no longer what it used to be, according to Lario. Greater urbanization and connectivity between rural, urban and peri-urban areas means “new consumer behaviors and diets,” he said.
Around the world, people are increasingly overweight and obese, presenting new diet-related health challenges, the report highlighted. It also found that globally, people are eating more processed food—and not just in urban areas.
“Rural populations are also consuming more highly processed food, which also has an impact in terms of nutrition, especially children’s nutrition,” said Lario, commenting on the report’s findings.
The demographic shift also creates opportunities, IFAD’s chief stressed. “Higher incomes and changing lifestyles lead to diets that go beyond the traditional grains, into dairy, fish, meat, vegetables, fruits,” Lario said, adding that this new demand provides a lot of opportunities for small-scale farmers “to feed the cities” and could help grow the midstream of food system — processing, packaging, transporting, selling and marketing.
This could create higher-income jobs for developing countries, especially in Africa, that are currently largely reliant on food imports.
To harness this potential, policies and legislation that better support this rural and urban connectivity are needed, along with those “that also link these small-scale producers and other small agribusiness to fair and remunerative markets,” said Lario.
Five U.N. agencies compile the report annually: the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Health Organization and the World Food Program.