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One in ten people in the world faced hunger in 2021, according to the most recent FAO report. In addition to extreme weather changes, the situation has been made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Hunger increased in 2021 and in various regions of the world it increased in a way that has not been seen before. This is one of the findings of the most recent report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The report released in July this year shows the situation of food security and nutrition in the world.
Another of the results of the report is that a third of the world’s population faces moderate food insecurity, that is, that their food is not adequate for good nutrition or that these people have to skip some of their daily meals. While that insecurity is serious for 923 million people, which means that they spend a whole day or more without eating anything.
And the most worrying thing is that food safety is increasingly at risk. The FAO states that between 702 and 828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021. That is, 103 million more people than those registered in 2019 and 46 million more than in 2020.
Furthermore, last year, food insecurity increased in all regions except Asia. While in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean it reached levels not seen since 2014, when the FAO began to make the scale to measure the prevalence of malnutrition.
According to the UN body, there are three factors that have increased the number of hungry people: economic contractions that worsened with the Covid-19 pandemic, armed conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, and the climate crisis.
Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who report to the UN, had already warned about this last point. In its 2018 reportstated that food security was being affected by rising temperatures, changes in rainfall patterns and the greater frequency of extreme events, such as prolonged droughts or periods of flooding.
All this is reducing the yields of some crops, such as corn and wheat. On the other hand, global warming hits crops hard in dry and high mountain regions. Even excessive heat is causing fruits and vegetables to be of lower nutritional quality. At the other extreme, excessive flooding has caused the loss of thousands of crops.
These situations, added to the cereal export difficulties of Ukraine and Russia (which together produce 30% of these products) and the historical increase in inflation in many countries, are responsible for aggravating food security. At least 45 countries face the greatest risk of a food crisis, according to Boston Consulting Group.
These nations are more exposed as they tend to rely heavily on food imports, have high levels of extreme poverty and also face high climate risks.
At France 24 en Español we speak with Martha Isabel Cambas, Caribbean regional coordinator of the organization Action Against Hunger. She explained to us how the climate crisis impacts crops in Latin American countries such as Haiti and Colombia. And she also proposed solutions in crops to face climate extremes.
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