MILLIONS MORE ON THE VERGE OF FOOD CRISIS

CLIMATE, CONFLICTS ARE SET TO PLUNGE MILLIONS MORE INTO FOOD CRISIS

• Khaleej Times
• 3 Apr 2019
• — Reuters, AFP

Food crises will affect tens of millions of people across the world this year, researchers warned on Tuesday, after war, extreme weather and economic woes in 2018 left more than 113 million in dire need of help.

Conflict and insecurity were responsible for the desperate situation faced by 74 million people, or two-thirds of those affected, in 2018, said the Global Network against Food Crises in its annual report.

The Network’s members include the United Nations’

Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Food Programme, and the European Union. Analysing 53 countries, it uses a five-phase scale with the third level classified as crisis, fourth as emergency and fifth as famine/catastrophe.

Luca Russo, FAO’s senior food crises analyst, warned that millions more are now at risk of reaching level three and above.

“The 113 million is what we call the tip of the iceberg. If you look at the numbers further down, you have people who are not food insecure but they are on the verge,” Russo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

These people, a further 143 million, are “so fragile that it just takes a bit of a drought” for them to fall into food crisis, he said.

“Unless we work substantially on these

MORE THAN HALF OF THE 113M ACUTELY FOOD-INSECURE PEOPLE WERE IN 33 AFRICAN COUNTRIES

people and remove some of the drivers that can bring them to a worse situation, the overall numbers are likely to increase,” Russo added.

Of countries that suffered food crises in 2018, the worst affected was Yemen, where nearly 16 million people needed urgent food aid after four years of war, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo at 13 million and Afghanistan at 10.6 million. As dire as the situations seem, they would be worse without international humanitarian assistance, with estimates showing the number of hungry people in Yemen would have reached more than 20 million, Russo said. This is the third year running where the number of people in food crisis hit more than 100 million, but it is slightly lower than in 2017, when 124 million were in need of help. The decrease is mainly because in 2018, countries did not experience the same levels of drought, flooding, erratic rains and temperature rises they did in 2017, said report.

However, climate shocks and conflicts would continue to cause hunger in 2019, the report added. —

The number of displaced people, refugees and migrants are expected to increase if the political and economic crisis persists in Venezuela

FAO report

Food crises will affect tens of millions of people across the world this year, researchers warned on Tuesday, after war, extreme weather and economic woes in 2018 left more than 113 million in dire need of help.

Conflict and insecurity were responsible for the desperate situation faced by 74 million people, or two-thirds of those affected, in 2018, said the Global Network against Food Crises in its annual report.

The Network’s members include the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme, and the European Union.

Analysing 53 countries, it uses a five-phase scale with the third level classified as crisis, fourth as emergency and fifth as famine/ catastrophe.

Luca Russo, FAO’s senior food crises analyst, warned that millions

more are now at risk of reaching level three and above.

“The 113 million is what we call the tip of the iceberg. If you look at the numbers further down, you have people who are not food insecure but they are on the verge,” Russo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

These people, a further 143 million, are “so fragile that it just takes a bit of a drought” for them to fall into food crisis, he said.

“Unless we work substantially on these people and remove some of the drivers that can bring them to a worse situation, the overall numbers are likely to increase,” Russo added.

Of countries that suffered food crises in 2018, the worst affected was Yemen, where nearly 16 million people needed urgent food aid after four years of war, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo at 13 million and Afghanistan at 10.6 million.

As dire as the situations seem, they would be worse without international humanitarian assistance, with estimates showing the number of hungry people in Yemen would have reached more than 20 million, Russo said.

African states were “disproportionally” affected as close to 72 million people on the continent suffered acute hunger, the FAO’s emergencies director Dominique Bourgeon told AFP on Tuesday.

In countries on the verge of famine, “up to 80 per cent of the population depend on agriculture. They need both emergency humanitarian aid for food and measures to help boost agriculture”, Bourgeon said.

The report highlighted the strain put on countries hosting large numbers of refugees, including neighbouring nations of war-torn Syria as well as Bangladesh, which has received more than a million Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar.

The FAO said it also expected the number of displaced people to increase “if the political and economic crisis persists in Venezuela” which is likely to declare a food emergency this year.

Bourgeon said he was concerned by the “important and significative rise” in poverty in Venezuela, as it grapples with dire economic and living conditions worsened by an ongoing political crisis.

“The number of displaced people, refugees and migrants are expected to increase if the political and economic crisis persists in Venezuela,” the report stated.

This is the third year running where the number of people in food crisis hit more than 100 million, but it is slightly lower than in 2017, when 124 million were in need of help.

The decrease is mainly because in 2018, countries did not experience the same levels of drought, flooding, erratic rains and temperature rises they did in 2017, said report.

However, the FAO warned that the year-on-year trend of more than 100 million people facing famine was unlikely to change in the face of continued crises.

Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria all suffered bad droughts in 2018, which severely impacted agricultural output.

The FAO also stressed that “high levels of acute and chronic malnutrition in children living in emergency conditions remained of grave concern”.

However, climate shocks and conflicts would continue to cause hunger in 2019, the report added.

Dry weather and El Nino conditions are likely to affect southern Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, while the needs of refugees and migrants in Bangladesh and Syria would remain high, it said.

The study excluded 13 countries and territories including North Korea, Venezuela and Western Sahara due to a lack of recently validated data.

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