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The last famine in Germany was a long time ago.

But not so long that not some could remember.

The summer of 1946 was hot and dry and the harvest was meager.

The following icy, long winter with temperatures down to minus 20 degrees hit a war-torn country with an exhausted population.

Historians estimate the number of dead, including many small children, at hundreds of thousands.

Today, hunger is no longer an issue in developed economies.

Households in Germany are satisfied with 14 percent of their disposable income - that is the average they spend on food and beverages.

Well-off families get by with well below ten percent.

Mathematically, food production is sufficient for everyone worldwide.

If there were neither wars nor corruption, neither waste nor inefficiency, nobody would have to go to bed in the evening with an empty stomach.

But the reality is more cruel.

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In the Corona year 2020, the number of hungry people will rise again for the first time after decades of slow but steady improvement.

"Covid-19, conflict and climate change have reversed poverty alleviation progress for the first time in a generation," a recent World Bank report said.

In the past 30 years, the number of the very poor - by which statisticians mean people who live on less than $ 1.90 a day - had fallen to 698 million.

Despite the rising world population, that is only a third of the figure from 1990. "Over the past quarter century, the world has made unprecedented progress in reducing poverty and has shown what global efforts can achieve," said the World bank.

Millions of people are falling back into extreme poverty

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But now the positive trend has broken off.

“The fight against poverty has suffered its worst setback in decades,” says the report entitled “Reversals of Fortune”.

After that, the pandemic will plunge 100 million people back into extreme poverty, likely with significant long-term consequences.

"Hunger and poverty form a vicious circle," warns Welthungerhilfe.

"Malnutrition is not just a consequence of poverty, it also causes poverty by being passed down from generation to generation."

Source: WORLD infographic

The hard-won successes in fighting hunger and poverty are at risk.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that the number of undernourished people could rise to almost 830 million by the end of this year.

The United Nations' goal of reducing the proportion of the extremely poor to less than three percent of the world's population by 2030 is already practically impossible to achieve.

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The coronavirus is not the only cause of the deterioration in people's living conditions in many endangered regions.

The pace of positive development had already slowed down in the years before the current crisis.

While extreme poverty decreased by around one percentage point annually between 1990 and 2015, this rate has halved since then.

In some regions, poverty rose again in previous years, mostly as a result of political disputes.

The conflicts in Syria and Yemen between 2015 and 2018 led to a doubling of the proportion of very poor people to a good seven percent in the Middle East.

Now the corona pandemic is forcing millions worldwide back into a situation of shortage in which everything is missing, especially food.

The “new poor” live in urban areas

"According to the latest estimates, up to 6,000 children could die every day from preventable causes from the direct and indirect consequences of Covid-19," fears Mark Lowcock, UN Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.

In addition to falling income, there are rising food prices.

The Washington research institute IFPRI is assuming price increases by an average of 20 percent in the course of the crisis.

This is a manageable figure for consumers who only need to spend a small percentage of their income on food, but it is painful for people who need almost all of their budget to buy food.

The virus is about to fundamentally change the face of poverty.

Until now, it was considered that those affected were typically young and poorly educated and that they lived predominantly in the countryside.

The “new poor”, as the World Bank calls them, live in urban areas.

They are better educated than the chronically poor and they do not work in agriculture.

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Rather, many of them are employed in the construction or industry, others work as service staff in bars and hotels.

With the help of such jobs, hundreds of millions of people have made it out of absolute poverty into somewhat less precarious conditions in recent years.

In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, numerous people would have exceeded the $ 1.90 mark - but often only slightly.

Now the economic crisis hit these regions hardest by the pandemic.

According to estimates by the International Labor Organization (ILO), around one billion jobs have been lost worldwide since the pandemic began.

On paper, the countries with the lowest per capita income got off comparatively lightly, with job losses down by nine percent.

However, according to the World Bank, behind this number lies an inadequacy of statistics.

Often there are no transfers from migrant workers

Around 60 percent of jobs in poor countries are located in the so-called informal sector, with no health and safety, vacation entitlement or social security.

And without statistical recording.

“Those who narrowly escaped extreme poverty can easily fall behind.

They are particularly prone to renewed impoverishment from the pandemic, conflict and climate change, ”the experts write.

According to a study by the African Development Bank, the economic output of the entire continent will be up to 190 billion dollars lower than originally forecast this year due to the corona crisis.

But the decline of the more prosperous economies also has an indirect effect in the poor regions.

In many countries there are no remittances that migrant workers abroad regularly send to their families in their impoverished homeland.

Their economic importance is often underestimated.

According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the level of remittances worldwide exceeded government development aid of almost 160 billion dollars worldwide many times over last year.

In some African countries, private remittances from abroad account for 10 percent or more of gross domestic product (GDP), and in some up to a third.

But this year, according to expert forecasts, this flow of money into the poor regions is likely to be 20 percent or 110 billion dollars less than last year.

How bad and lasting the setback caused by the pandemic in the fight against poverty and hunger will be cannot yet be definitively determined.

With a sum of 90 billion dollars, the poorest ten percent of the world's population could be protected from the worst consequences of disease and recession, estimates Mark Lowcock.

That doesn't even correspond to one percent of the sum that the rich countries are spending on boosting their own economies in the wake of the Corona crisis.