Between 713 and 757 million people did not have enough food in 2023, meaning that one in 11 people in the world went hungry last year. The figure, which has barely changed over the past three years – in 2022 it was between 691 and 783 million – reveals that the world has not yet been able to return to the pre-Covid level. “Some 152 million more people than in 2019” are in a situation of food insecurity or malnutrition, conclude the authors of the main annual study on hunger, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024 (SOFI), published on Wednesday and prepared by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP), UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO).
“The worst thing that can happen to the more than 700 million hungry people in the world is that we accept this as normal,” laments Amador Gómez, director of Research and Innovation at Action Against Hunger, over the phone. Because hunger, he recalls, “is not inevitable, since it is not a problem of food availability, but of access to that food.” However, if the course is not changed, “projections indicate that in 2030 there will be 582 million people suffering from food insecurity and hunger,” a figure far from the “zero hunger” objective that the United Nations set for that date, laments Álvaro Lario, president of IFAD in an interview with this newspaper. Of these, “53% will be in Africa.”
The African continent remains the region of the world with the highest percentage of hungry people (20.4%), compared to 8.1% in Asia, 6.2% in Latin America and 7.3% in Oceania. In fact, in-depth analysis of the data indicates that if the number of malnourished people remained stable in 2023 it is because “the significant reduction in hunger in Latin America”, by around five million people, offset the increase in Africa – in Asia, it has barely changed. “The challenge in the future is going to be greater and the situation may be even more complicated because the African population is very young and continues to grow in a context where inequality is very high,” concludes Lario, who points out that if one in 11 people suffers from hunger in the world, this proportion, in the African case, is one in five.
The key factors that are causing the hunger situation in Africa to continue to deteriorate are the “increase in conflicts and vulnerability to climate change, because these are countries with few resources and less resilience, as well as the impact of both the economic recession and the debt problem,” explains Máximo Torero, chief economist at the FAO, in an interview with EL PAÍS. “Africa is a continent that imports a large part of its food, so when global interest rates rise, if your central bank is not very strong, the local exchange rate is devalued and, at the same time, countries have to pay more for their debt,” he adds. All of this causes “severe restrictions on the ability to buy and pay the cost of the imports required” to feed the population.
Improvements in Latin America and other advances
The opposite is true in Latin America, Torero continues, where hunger has been reduced because there is “better preparation in terms of social protection mechanisms, which has allowed them to focus interventions more and respond more quickly.” Precisely this week, the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty will be launched in Brazil, promoted by the Brazilian presidency of the G-20, to extend the lessons learned in Latin America, such as the creation of small and medium-sized businesses of small producers that promote employment especially in rural areas or social protection systems such as school breakfasts.
The report highlights some of the progress made, such as in infant feeding for children under five years of age and exclusive breastfeeding for children under six months, although “the global prevalence of low birth weight and overweight in children has stagnated, while anaemia in women aged 15 to 49 years has increased”. “Global rates of childhood stunting have been reduced by a third, or 55 million, in the last two decades, showing that investments in maternal and child nutrition are worthwhile”, says Catherine Russell, executive director of Unicef. However, she points out that “one in four children under five years of age still suffers from malnutrition, which can cause long-term damage”.
Another of the “positive” data provided by SOFI, Lario highlights, is that in 2023 “the gender gap in food insecurity was reduced, which after the pandemic was 3.6% higher among women and has now dropped to 1.2%.”
The number of people with access to healthy food has also improved globally. While 42% of the world’s population (around 3.1 billion people) did not have access to it in 2022, in 2023 this percentage fell to 33% (2.8 billion). But once again, inequalities in access to sufficiently nutritious food are evident: “Low-income countries have the highest percentage of the population that cannot afford a healthy diet, with 71.5%, compared to lower-middle-income countries (52.6%), upper-middle-income countries (21.5%) and high-income countries (6.3%)”, highlights the 2024 SOFI.
However, despite improvements in access to healthy food, “new estimates of adult obesity show a steady increase over the past decade, from 12.1% in 2012 to 15.8% in 2022,” recalls UNICEF, which warns that projections indicate that by 2030 there will be more than 1.2 billion obese adults in the world.
Financing food security
One of the greatest benefits of the 2024 SOFI report is that it “defines” the concept of “food security financing” to better understand “what the financing gaps are, how much we spend and how much we need, and where we should invest to end hunger,” explains Amador Gómez, Director of Research and Innovation at Action Against Hunger.
This argument is shared by Máximo Torero. “Depending on what the definition of food security financing includes,” the value of the needs can be calculated at 6.9 billion dollars (6.354 billion euros) or 62 billion, cites the chief economist of the FAO as an example, to underline the importance of universalizing the definition.
In addition to establishing how much, where and how to use resources, Gómez recalls the importance of Artificial Intelligence in the fight against hunger with alert systems to predict both extreme weather events and the evolution of basic food basket prices. According to the expert, “these data will allow us to create hot maps to identify where the pockets of hunger and the most vulnerable areas are and to implement anticipatory measures.”
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