Since 2015, the number of hungry people in the world has been rising steadily, reversing years of progress, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva told member states on Monday at the opening of the agency’s biennial conference in Rome, Italy.
Graziano da Silva pointed out that almost 60 percent of people suffering from hunger live in countries affected by conflict and climate change. In 2016, the number of famine victims affected globally grew to 108 million, up from 80 million in 2015.
“Unfortunately this is not good news,” Graziano da Silva added.
Currently, the FAO has identified 19 countries in what the agency describes as a “protracted crisis situation,” many also facing extreme climate events such as drought and flooding. Additionally, four countries – northeast Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen with 20 million people, have been designated as at “high risk for famine.”
In the four high-risk countries, ongoing conflicts have hit the mainly rural populations hard, and the added climate events, like drought and flooding, have left people’s lives disrupted and “many of them have found no option other than increasing the statistics of distress migration,” Graziano da Silva said.
In his report, Graziano da Silva cited some statistics on the four countries – Over a fifth of the population in Somalia are in danger of starvation, while the famine crisis continues, spreading to 4.9 million people in South Sudan, 8.1 million Nigerians and an incredible 20 million in Yemen.
It should be pointed out that a number of countries are suffering from a food insecurity crisis because of the displacement of refugees from other countries where internal conflicts and climate extremes have placed a burden on the host communities.
The populations worst affected by displacement are those of Syria (6.3 million internally displaced people – (IDPs) and Syrian refugees in neighboring countries (4.8 million), Iraq (3.1 million), Yemen (3.2 million), South Sudan (3 million), Somalia (2.1 million) and northeast Nigeria (2.1 million).
Achieving zero hunger by the year 2030 is one of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals adopted by member states in 2015. However, David Beasley, the head of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) said the goal had “zero chance of succeeding in the atmosphere that we have in the world today” due to conflicts.
And as long as the terrible conflicts we are experiencing in our world today go on, hunger, famine, and death will be the only future for millions of the world’s people, and that is not a pretty picture.
