Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

UN: World Going Backwards on Ending hunger, Malnutrition


Thu 07 Jul 2022 | 03:52 PM

In a new report issued this week, the United Nations warns that the number of people affected by hunger globally increased to as many as 828 million in 2021, an increase of about 46 million since 2020 and 150 million since the outbreak of the awful pandemic.

This new report, entitled: The 2022 edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) presents updates on the food security and nutrition situation around the world, including the latest estimates of the cost and affordability of a healthy diet.

The latest report also examines ways governments can repurpose their current support to agriculture to help make healthy and nutritious food cheaper, mindful of the limited public resources available in many parts of the world.

The report which is conducted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the UN World Food Programme (WFP), and the World Health Organization (WHO) noted that nearly, 2.3 billion people in the world (29.3 percent) were moderately or severely food insecure in 2021 – 350 million more compared to before the outbreak of the pandemic.

"About 924 million people faced food insecurity at severe levels, an increase of 207 million in two years."

It added that the gender gap in food insecurity continued to rise in 2021 - 31.9 percent of women in the world were moderately or severely food insecure, compared to 27.6 percent of men – a gap of more than 4 percentage points, compared with 3 percentage points in 2020.

Almost 3.1 billion people could not afford a healthy diet in 2020, up 112 million from 2019, reflecting the effects of inflation in consumer food prices stemming from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures put in place to contain it, it warned.

The report showed that  45 million children under the age of five were suffering from wasting, the deadliest form of malnutrition, which increases children’s risk of death by up to 12 times. Another 149 million children under the age of five had stunted growth and development due to a chronic lack of essential nutrients in their diets, while 39 million were overweight.

In June, FAO, World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, Near East and North Africa Region, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the WFP in the MENA and North Africa Region held a high-level meeting to accelerate action on maternal and child undernutrition.

The meeting brought together senior representatives from ministries of health, agriculture, planning, social welfare, and education, and a wide range of stakeholders, including academia, research institutions, civil society, and regional and country office representatives from the four UN agencies, according to a joint statement released by the UN institutions in Egypt.

The overall objective of the meeting is two-fold: to support low- and middle-income countries facing high levels of undernutrition and food insecurity – in particular Afghanistan, Djibouti, Lebanon, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Yemen – and to issue a call for action to address maternal, infant and child undernutrition in the Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Mediterranean and Arab regions based on a life-course and systems approach, the statement explained.

The food security situation and the humanitarian and economic crises in these countries are having detrimental effects on access to healthy diets, purchasing power and dietary patterns, and are adversely affecting the nutritional status of the most vulnerable particularly children, adolescent girls and women, it added.

Further, the health and humanitarian crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has undermined food security and nutrition.

Furthermore, global food prices have reached an all-time high in 2022 and the conflict in Ukraine threatens to disrupt global supplies of wheat, maize and other crops, as well as fertilizer, creating further pressure on prices and additional challenges to ensuring food security for many countries, the statement noted.