“People in Gaza are starving to death right now. The speed at which this man-made hunger and malnutrition crisis has ripped through Gaza is terrifying,” the head of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) Cindy McCain said.

“To have 50 percent of an entire population in catastrophic, near-famine levels, is unprecedented,” Beth Bechdol, the deputy director general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), told AFP.

This amounts to around 1.1 million people “struggling with catastrophic hunger and starvation”, according to the WFP.

It added: “This is the highest number of people ever recorded as facing catastrophic hunger” under the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) partnership, which published its latest report on Monday.

The situation is particularly dire in the north of the besieged Palestinian territory, where there are about 300,000 people, the UN says — and where aid agencies have reported huge difficulty distributing food and other aid.

Aid charity Oxfam on Monday accused Israel of continuing to “systematically and deliberately block and undermine” the delivery of aid into Gaza, in violation of international humanitarian law.

The IPC system, conducted by the UN and aid agencies, is used by the UN or governments in deciding whether or not to officially declare a famine.

“Famine is imminent in the northern governorates and projected to occur anytime between mid-March and May 2024,” the IPC report said of Gaza.

“All evidence points towards a major acceleration of deaths and malnutrition. Waiting for a retrospective famine classification before acting is indefensible,” it said.

– ‘Wasted’ children –

A famine is declared when 20 percent of households face an extreme food shortage — which is the case in Gaza, the UN says — one in three children are acutely malnourished, and at least two in every 10,000 people die every day of starvation or malnutrition.

Children in Gaza face “extremely critical health conditions… exposing them to high-risk nutritional deterioration”, the IPC report said.

According to the WFP, “one in three children below the age of two is now acutely malnourished, or ‘wasted’.

“This means they are dangerously thin for their height, which puts them at risk of death.”

Arif Husain, WFP’s chief economist, warned the final criteria for declaring a famine — the mortality rate — would “happen any time from now until the end of May”.

FAO’s Bechdol said that challenges of data collection and analysis meant it was “possible that famine is already occurring in the north”.

Gazans were “turning to alternative sources” for food, including animal feed and “inedible items, purely out of desperation”, she told AFP.

Donors have turned to deliveries by air or sea, but air and sea missions are no alternative to land deliveries, UN agencies say.

WFP said meeting basic food needs would require at least 300 trucks to enter Gaza every day and distribute food, especially in the north.

The agency has only managed to get nine convoys into the north since the start of the year, it said. 

The latest of these, on Sunday night, involved 18 truckloads of food supplies delivered to Gaza City.

“The convoy, the second to use a coordinated route into Gaza City and the north, delivered some 274 metric tons of wheat flour, food parcels and ready-to-eat rations. 

“This route needs to be made available for daily convoys and safe access to the north,” it said.

The Rome-based agency said it needed Israel to “provide more entry points into Gaza” and allow use of the Ashdod port to bring in food aid.

The WFP’s Husain said: “Our hope is we can still avert a full-fledged famine.”

“But the window is shutting and it is shutting very, very fast”.

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The war between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, has since April last year killed tens of thousands, destroyed infrastructure and crippled the economy.

It has also triggered a dire humanitarian crisis and acute food shortages, with the country teetering on the brink of famine.

“Aid organisations require safe, rapid, sustained and unimpeded access — including across conflict lines within Sudan,” said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

“A massive mobilisation of resources from the international community is also critical,” he added.

The UN’s World Food Programme has warned that the war risks “triggering the world’s largest hunger crisis”.

Jill Lawler, the emergency chief in Sudan for the UN children’s agency UNICEF, said there were enough aid stocks in Port Sudan, but the problem was getting the aid from there to the people in need.

Lawler said she last week had led the first UN mission to reach Khartoum state since war erupted 11 months ago.

They had seen first-hand that “the scale and magnitude of needs for children across the country are simply staggering”, she told reporters in Geneva via video link from New York. 

The war “is pushing the country towards a famine” with hunger “the number one concern people expressed”.

– ‘Moment of truth’ –

Mandeep O’Brien, UNICEF representative in Sudan, said 14 million children needed humanitarian aid and four million were displaced.

There was only a “small window left to prevent mass loss of children lives and future”, she warned on X, formerly Twitter.

World Health Organization regional director Hanan Balkhy, who recently returned from a trip to Sudan, underlined the acute needs in Darfur, saying most health facilities were looted, damaged or destroyed.

UN aid chief Martin Griffiths lamented that fighting continued to rage during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan despite a Security Council resolution calling for a cessation of hostilities.

“This is a moment of truth,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “The parties must silence the guns, protect civilians and ensure humanitarian access.”

The UN on Friday called for more financial support for aid operations in Sudan. 

UN spokeswoman Alessandra Vellucci told reporters in Geneva that the world body had appealed for $2.7 billion to provide aid this year, but had received just five percent of that amount so far.

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“Ramadan? We’ve been doing that for months!” said Khartoum resident Othman Idriss, referring to the daytime fast observed by the faithful during the Muslim holy month.

“We have been eating one meal a day for months and we no longer even have the means to prepare it ourselves,” he told AFP in a phone call.

“They serve it to us in a soup kitchen organised in a mosque.”

Before the war erupted on April 15, towards the end of last year’s Ramadan, Idriss ran a small food store.

But since the fighting between rival generals turned the capital’s streets into a bloody war zone, he has been unable to return to the shop or the neighbourhood of the capital where it once stood.

The nearly 11-month war, which pits the regular army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions and reduced much of the country’s infrastructure to rubble.

In North Kordofan state, where the RSF holds sway, Mohammed Soleiman insists on keeping his shop in the city of Al-Rahad open even though customers are few and far between.

The paramilitaries “charge taxes on all the trucks, so the prices go up and there are fewer and fewer products arriving,” Soleiman told AFP.

– No wages –

Until recently, Imad Mohammed was able to use a banking app to receive cash transfers from relatives abroad to help feed his family.

Despite a currency in freefall and triple-digit inflation even before the war broke out, the app had served as a lifeline to thousands, allowing them to make transfers and purchases and to receive cash.

But weeks ago, even that last financial safety net was lost, when telecommunications were suddenly cut in several states and cities. 

“For 11 months, I have received no salary,” said Mohammed, a teacher from Wad Madani, south of Khartoum.

Like all public employees in the battle zones, Mohammed has been left with next to no income.

Some staff have sporadically received parts of their wages, while others have had nothing at all.

“We’re beginning Ramadan and we are already hungry,” he said.

The United Nations estimates that 18 million of Sudan’s 48 million people are acutely food insecure, five million of whom have reached the last level before famine.

Less than five percent of Sudanese “can afford a full meal”, said the World Food Programme, which fears “the largest famine crisis in the world”.

– Hungry children –

A child dies of malnutrition every two hours in the Zamzam camp for displaced people in North Darfur state, according to Doctors Without Borders.

On the other side of Darfur, in the Kalma displaced persons’ camp, Ishaq Mohammed said he and his seven family members felt abandoned.

“The humanitarian organisations left with the war, the odd jobs that we managed to find before have disappeared, so for months we have only eaten one meal a day and, often, we go without to give it to the children,” he told AFP.

That sense of abandonment is echoed by Sudan specialists who warn that the conflict has been forgotten.

British researcher Alex de Waal said that while a decade ago any UN emergency appeal could expect to raise two-thirds of the funds requested, in recent years that has dropped to 30 percent.

“Currently the funding appeal to Sudan is funded to no more than three percent,” de Waal said.

“That is a really deeply alarming scenario.”

As funding fails to materialise, food is only getting more scarce, said de Waal. 

“We have not yet got to the data to indicate that we are in famine. But that data blackout is no cause for any complacency,” he said.

According to the aid group Save the Children, nearly 230,000 children and new mothers in Sudan are “likely to die from hunger” without urgent intervention. 

In better times, Khartoum families would flock to Sudan’s pre-war breadbasket Al-Jazira state for Ramadan weekends.

But after RSF forces swept through the state in December, there is no mood for celebration and the rich aromas of Ramadan specialities are gone, replaced by the stench of gunpowder.

“This year, Ramadan has no flavour,” said Al-Jazira resident Nahed Mustafa.

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The UN and other humanitarian actors have not yet declared a state of famine in Gaza, despite worsening conditions in the Palestinian territory since the war started with the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7.

However, “once a famine is declared, it is too late for too many people”, said Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA.

“We don’t want to get to that situation and we need things to change before that,” he told a briefing in Geneva.

Thousands have already died in the conflict. Hamas militants killed about 1,160 people in Israel on October 7, according to an AFP tally of Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory bombardment and ground offensive in Gaza have killed more than 30,000 people since, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Humanitarian agencies say conditions for the 2.2 million people in Gaza are now dire.

“We have to look at what more and more voices, more and more loudly, are saying about the food security situation acros the Gaza Strip, in particular in the north,” said Laerke.

“If something doesn’t change, a famine is almost inevitable on the current trends.”

In Somalia in 2011, when famine was officially declared, half of the total number of victims of the disaster had already died of starvation.

Laerke cited the near-total closure of commercial food imports, the “trickle of trucks” coming in with food aid, and the “massive access constraints” to moving around inside the Palestinian territory.

– ‘High speed’ famine –

“All these things combined lead us to this warning that we do have a very, very dire situation coming towards us at very high speed,” he said.

World Health Organization spokesman Christian Lindmeier said that according to statistics compiled by the Hamas-run health ministry, 10 children have been “officially registered, in a hospital, as having starved to death”.

“The unoffical numbers can unfortunately be expected to be higher,” he told the briefing.

Laerke said seeing such warning signs were extremely worrying, particularly given than the food security before the war was relatively good.

The coastal territory had been producing its own food, but now, “the production of foodstuff within Gaza itself is almost impossible”, including the key fishing industry which has “completely stopped”.

“So the very foundation for people’s daily sustenance is being ripped away,” he said.

Israeli forces in war-ravaged Gaza opened fire Thursday as Palestinian civilians scrambled for food aid during a chaotic incident which the health ministry said killed more than 100 people.

The Israeli military said a “stampede” occurred when thousands of desperate Gazans surrounded a convoy of 38 aid trucks, leading to dozens of deaths and injuries, including some who were run over.

The UN was not involved in the convoy.

“People are so desperate for food, for fresh water, for any supplies, they risk their lives in getting any food, any supplies to support their children and themselves,” Lindmeier said.

“This is the real catastrophe here: that food and supplies are so scarce that we see these situations.”

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In the Jabalia refugee camp north of Gaza City, dozens of children wander around carrying empty pots, looking for anything edible.

Nearly five months after the start of the war, Gazans are despairing at the little humanitarian aid entering the coastal territory, particularly in the north. Some say they resort to eating leaves, or fodder for livestock.

In deciding whether or when to declare a famine, the UN relies on its specialised agencies based in Rome, the World Food Programme (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which in turn use the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

The IPC gathers evidence — such as how many households are facing an extreme lack of food — to draw up its Acute Food Insecurity scale, which is then used to inform decisions, such as how resources are allocated.

– What is famine? –

Famine exists in areas where at least one in five households has or is most likely to have an extreme deprivation of food and face starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition.

“If nothing changes, a famine is imminent in northern Gaza,” WFP’s deputy executive director Carl Skau told the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

No humanitarian group has been able to provide aid to the area since January 23, as Israel wages war on Palestinian militant group Hamas.

The UN estimates that 2.2 million people, the vast majority of Gaza’s population, are on the brink of famine — particularly in the north, where Israeli forces block aid from entering.

Some 97 percent of groundwater in Gaza is “reportedly unfit for human consumption”, and agricultural production is beginning to collapse, Maurizio Martina, deputy director general of the FAO, told the Council.

UN aid chief Martin Griffiths last week wrote to the Security Council calling on members to act to prohibit “the use of starvation of civilian population as a method of warfare.”

– How is famine measured? –

Famine tops the IPC’s food insecurity scale, which has five phases.

Phase one is “Minimal” or no food insecurity in households. Phase two is when households are “Stressed”, phase three is when they are in “Crisis”, and phase four is “Emergency”.

Phase five, “Catastrophe / Famine” is when households experience “extreme critical levels of acute malnutrition and mortality”.

For famine to be declared, these three things must happen:

– at least 20 percent of households must face an extreme lack of food.

– one out of three children must be acutely malnourished. 

– there must be two deaths for every 10,000 inhabitants, or four child deaths out of 10,000 children per day, due to starvation or malnutrition and disease.

The UN children’s agency UNICEF has warned that the alarming lack of food, surging malnutrition and disease could lead to an “explosion” in child deaths in Gaza.

– Causes of famine –

The main causes of famine are:

– natural disasters such as drought, floods, or earthquakes; human pandemics and epidemics such as measles; or crop pests like locusts.

– economic crises which can affect food prices and employment opportunities.

– when humanitarian aid is not brought in quickly or efficiently enough.

– conflict, which often leads to population displacements, prevents people from cultivating land, and destroys markets and infrastructure.

In Jabalia, 60-year-old Palestinian farmer Abu Gibril told AFP last week he was so desperate for food to feed his family that he slaughtered two of his horses.

“We had no other choice but to slaughter the horses to feed the children. Hunger is killing us,” he told AFP.

– Who declares famine? –

Once the criteria determined by the IPC are met, it is up to government authorities and UN agencies to declare a famine.

The IPC told AFP on Thursday that its next detailed report on Gaza is expected at the beginning of March.

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With a dire humanitarian emergency unfolding in the Gaza Strip and the main UN aid agency there struggling to cope, other bodies have called for help in reaching the thousands of Palestinians in desperate need.  

“If nothing changes, a famine is imminent in northern Gaza,” WFP’s deputy executive director Carl Skau told the UN Security Council, while his colleague from the UN humanitarian office OCHA, Ramesh Rajasingham, warned of “almost inevitable” widespread starvation.

As aid remains blocked from entering northern Gaza by Israeli forces, and only enters the rest of the territory in dribs and drabs, UN aid chief Martin Griffiths last week wrote to the Security Council calling on members to act to prohibit “the use of starvation of civilian population as a method of warfare.”

“Here we are, at the end of February, with at least 576,000 people in Gaza — one-quarter of the population — one step away from famine, with one in six children under two years of age in northern Gaza suffering from acute malnutrition and wasting,” OCHA’s Rajasingham said. 

Some 97 percent of groundwater in Gaza is “reportedly unfit for human consumption” and agricultural production is beginning to collapse, warned Maurizio Martina, deputy director general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). 

Aid is ready and waiting at the border, a spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also said Tuesday.

“WFP colleagues also tell us that they have food supplies at the border with Gaza, and with certain conditions they would be able to scale up feeding up to 2.2 million people” across the Strip, Stephane Dujarric told reporters. 

“Almost 1,000 trucks carrying 15,000 metric tons of food are in Egypt ready to move,” he said.

– Aid blocked by Israel –

But Israeli forces are “systematically” blocking access to Gaza, said Jens Laerke, spokesman for OCHA, in Geneva earlier Tuesday.

All planned aid convoys into the north have been denied by Israeli authorities in recent weeks.

The last allowed in was on January 23, according to the World Health Organization.

But Israeli deputy ambassador to the UN Jonathan Miller countered that “it is not Israel who is holding up these trucks,” instead placing the blame on the UN, which he said must distribute aid “more effectively.”

“There is no limit to the amount of humanitarian aid that can be sent to the civilian population of Gaza,” he said, adding that since the beginning of 2024 Israel had only denied 16 percent of requests to deliver aid, and those were due to risks the shipments could end up in Hamas’ hands.

The main UN aid agency in Gaza, UNRWA, meanwhile, is “at breaking point,” its head said last week. As donors freeze funding, Israel exerts pressure to dismantle the body and humanitarian needs soar.

“Israel must do more,” US deputy ambassador to the UN Robert Wood said Tuesday, calling on the country to “facilitate the opening of additional crossings” for aid.

“We should all have been convinced by now that our action is needed, indeed was needed a long time ago,” said Slovenian ambassador Samuel Zbogar.

The Hamas attack on October 7 that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of around 1,160 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

Militants also took about 250 hostages, 130 of whom remain in Gaza, including 31 presumed dead, according to Israel.

Israel’s military campaign has killed at least 29,878 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the territory’s health ministry.

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America’s top diplomat, chairing a meeting about food insecurity at the UN’s headquarters in New York, told the 15-member Council that “hunger must not be weaponized.”

He singled out Russia, saying its invasion of Ukraine last year had sparked an “assault” on the global food system.

Blinken lambasted Moscow for pulling out last month from the so-called Black Sea grain initiative.

The agreement had allowed Ukrainian grain exports via the sea, during the conflict between the two countries.

Moscow refused to extend the deal, leading to a spike in grain prices that hit poorer countries hard.

“Every member of this council, every member of the United Nations should tell Moscow enough, enough using the Black Sea as blackmail,” said Blinken.

“Enough treating the world’s most vulnerable people as leverage. Enough of this unjustified unconscionable war,” he added.

The agreement, signed in July 2022 with Turkey acting as UN-backed facilitator between Ukraine and Russia, aimed to alleviate the risk of famine in the world by guaranteeing access of Ukrainian grain to work markets despite the war.

Moscow is demanding guarantees on another agreement concerning its own exports, in particular of fertilizer components.

Russian drones on Wednesday damaged infrastructure at a Ukrainian port on the Danube, as Moscow targeted facilities vital for grain shipments from Ukraine following the collapse of the deal.

Blinken said grain prices had increased by more than eight percent around the world since Russia’s withdrawal.

The Secretary of State presided over the meeting after the United States took over the monthly presidency of the Security Council on Tuesday.

Washington intends to issue a “joint communique condemning the use of food as a weapon of war” adopted on the sidelines of the meeting, which has already been signed by 91 countries, Blinken told ABC News.

Blinken also announced $362 million in new funding for programs to combat food insecurity and malnutrition in a dozen African countries and Haiti, a US official said.

Some 345 million people in 79 countries suffer from acute food insecurity.

Among the many causes of world hunger, in addition to armed conflict, are the effects of climate change.

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Between 691 million and 783 million people faced hunger last year, with a midrange of 735 million, the five agencies said in a report.

The proportion of people facing chronic hunger rose from 7.9 percent of the world population in 2019 — before the pandemic — to 9.2 percent in 2022.

The annual rise “has stalled”, however, with the total falling by about 3.8 million people between 2021 and 2022, according to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report.

“There is no room for complacency though, as hunger is still on the rise throughout Africa, Western Asia and the Caribbean,” they warned.

The report is “a snapshot of the world still recovering from a global pandemic and now grappling with the consequences of the war in Ukraine, which has further rattled food and energy markets.” 

Since 2019, those crises have plunged an additional 122 million people into hunger, according to the UN, with women and those living in rural areas hit particularly hard.

The post-pandemic economic recovery helped improve the situation, “but there is no doubt that the modest progress has been undermined by rising food and energy prices magnified by the war in Ukraine,” said the report. 

The report was prepared by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization.

The estimates indicate that hunger “is no longer on the rise at the global level” but it remains “far above pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels and far off track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2” of a world free of hunger, the report said.

The UN agencies warned that if the world fails to redouble and better target its efforts, the “goal of ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030 will remain out of reach.” 

– ‘New normal’ –

“There are rays of hope, some regions are on track to achieve some 2030 nutrition targets,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.

“But overall, we need an intense and immediate global effort to rescue the Sustainable Development Goals.” 

Formulated in 2015 by the UN General Assembly, the Sustainable Development Goals include 17 interlinked objectives including ending hunger and poverty.

If the pace of progress does not pick up, nearly 600 million people could still suffer from hunger in 2030, mostly in Africa.

The UN agencies warned that the major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition — conflicts, economic shocks, natural catastrophes — as well as glaring inequality seem to become the “new normal”. 

“What we are missing is the investments and political will to implement solutions at scale,” said Alvaro Lario, head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The worst drought in four decades in the Horn of Africa region threatens to create a famine affecting more than 23 million people in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, the World Food Programme warned in May.

Some 2.4 billion people — three out of 10 people on the planet — suffered from moderate or severe food insecurity in 2022.

The pandemic hit the incomes of many people and the Ukraine war sent prices rising, leaving “billions without access to an affordable healthy diet,” the UN agencies said.

More than 3.1 billion people did not have enough money for a healthy, balanced diet last year, according to UN figures.

“Hunger is rising while the resources we urgently need to protect the most vulnerable are running dangerously low,” the WFP’s executive director Cindy McCain warned on Wednesday.

“As humanitarians, we are facing the greatest challenge we’ve ever seen.” 

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Emaciated by the malnutrition that kills dozens of children in the country’s northern La Guajira department every year, Rosalinda received emergency treatment that saved her life.

“It was like carrying a rag,” said the girl’s mother Magalis Iguaran, 32, who brought Rosalinda to Uribia, a town some 180 kilometers (112 miles) from their rural home in Puerto Estrella on the Guajira peninsula.

“She was very sick.”

Iguaran somehow managed to collect the equivalent of nearly $70 dollars from relatives for the jeep taxi ride that brought Rosalinda to the clinic — a fortune in a region where two-thirds of people live in poverty.

The toddler arrived acutely underweight and dehydrated, said pediatrician Karen Toncel. Her growth is stunted by a lack of food.

Five days after being admitted, Rosalinda was sitting up in bed “asking for food,” said her mother, her own thin frame draped in a loose yellow robe.

“When she first arrived she didn’t even want water… They saved her,” said Iguaran, whose only income is occasional money sent by her ex-partner, who rides a bicycle taxi.

Iguaran has three other children waiting back home, where she said her family eats no more than twice a day: “an arepa (a small maize cake) with cheese for breakfast and sometimes a lunch of rice with bits of beef.

“Food for five people is expensive.”

– ‘Failure’ –

In 2021, La Guajira, a largely desert department home to the Indigenous Wayuu people, had an under-five mortality rate of 21 per 1,000 births, according to official data.

In war-torn Syria, the figure was 22, according to UNICEF.

The department also has an acute lack of safe drinking water.

At least once a week, said pediatrician Toncel, a critical case of malnutrition requires a child to be transferred to intensive care at another hospital. 

The Unidad Materno Infantil Talapuin clinic where Toncel works has no such facilities.

As for fatalities, “there are one or two patients every month,” the pediatrician said — double the national rate.

Almost all patients with malnutrition are members of the Wayuu community.

In La Guajira as a whole, 20 children died of starvation in the first four months of leftist President Gustavo Petro’s new government — a “failure” he has admitted.

Countrywide, 308 children died of hunger last year — 85 of them in La Guajira, according to the ombudsman’s office.

This was 111 more than in 2021.

– Rice and beans –

Elsewhere in the department, in the settlement of Malirachon, Indigenous children take refuge from the sun under a canopy of dried-out cacti.

A visiting nutritionist measures their arms with a gadget that can detect possible malnutrition.

Of the 22 kids gathered there, two are declared at risk. 

“I feel sad for the child, he is sick,” said 22-year-old Sandra Epieyu of her one-year-old son Jose Fernando.

He and his four-year-old brother are both shockingly thin. 

Four months pregnant, Epieyu lights a wood fire in her wooden hut to cook chicha, a corn-based drink that makes up much of her diet. 

“In many communities this (chicha) is the only thing you will find for food,” said social worker Sandra Guillot.

“A day could go by and this would be all they eat.”

Epieyu makes about $8 to $10 per week selling articles she weaves by hand.

“Sometimes there is no food… sometimes we eat only once a day,” she told AFP.

Colombia, like many countries, is battling spiraling inflation which has reached a 21st-century record of 13.2 percent.

Like Epieyu, most in Malirachon have to fetch drinking water from a well.

She cannot carry water because of her pregnancy, and said sometimes she and her children use water they collect from puddles of rainwater shared with animals.

Children over the age of five are meant to receive food at school in Colombia, but a teacher who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing her job, said the rations are inadequate.

A former governor of the region is on trial for allegedly embezzling money from the school feeding program.

While children older than five are not included in official statistics, that does not mean the food shortages do not affect them.

In a small community near Manaure town in La Guajira Wilmer Epieyu — a common family name in the community — is being measured.

He stands 75 centimeters (29 inches) tall and weighs eight kilograms (about 18 pounds) — as much as a toddler of one.

He is seven.

“This is a very shocking case,” said nutritionist Nielcen Benitez from a local NGO.

Epieyu, she said, “will not be able to develop fully.”

Wilmer is one of eight children, five of whom have been treated for malnourishment.

Last year, Colombia took umbrage at being included in a report by UN agencies of 20 “hunger hotspots.”

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Normally such meetings are convened only once or twice a year, but the plenary comes just two months after a previous one, which also focused on agricultural issues.

The unusual frequency of the meetings focused on agriculture has fuelled speculation that there may be serious food shortages in North Korea now.

Kim chaired the opening on Sunday of a plenary meeting of top ruling party officials to “analyse and review… the programme for the rural revolution in the new era, and decide on the immediate important tasks and the urgent tasks,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported.

The participants “unanimously approved the agenda items and went into discussion” on the topic, the KCNA said without giving further details.

South Korea’s unification ministry says there have been reports of starvation deaths in the North.

“We judge the food shortages there to be grave,” ministry spokesman Koo Byoung-sam said last week, adding Pyongyang appeared to have requested food aid from the World Food Programme.

North Korea monitoring site 38 North said it judged the current food shortages in the country to be the worst in decades.

The Pyongyang regime was being forced to deal with “a complex humanitarian emergency that has food insecurity at its core”, it said in a January 2023 assessment. 

An analysis of rice and corn prices globally and in North Korea show “significant” price divergence since early 2021 — meaning food is far more expensive in the North — “signalling a breakdown” in supply, it added.

– Official denial –

But a recent commentary carried by North Korea’s main state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun said the country should continue to stick to the “self-sufficient economy” as part of its fight against “the imperialists”.

“The imperialists, under the cloak of the so-called ‘collaboration’ and ‘aid’, are clamouring as if some countries in economic difficulties could not tide over crises without their support.”

But such support are efforts to “make the countries their sources of raw materials and market after completely demolishing the barrier of their national economy”, Rodong said.

Nuclear-armed North Korea, which is under multiple sets of sanctions over its weapons programmes, has long struggled to feed itself. 

It is highly vulnerable to natural disasters including floods and drought due to a chronic lack of infrastructure, deforestation and decades of state mismanagement.

This has been compounded by a years-long self-imposed border closure since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which has only recently been eased to allow some trade with neighbouring China.

The country has periodically been hit by famines, one of which in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands of people — some estimates range into millions.

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