The number of people affected by acute hunger is increasing at an alarming rate.

This is the conclusion of the annual report of the Global Network against Food Crisis (GNAFC), an alliance of various governmental and non-governmental organizations.

The worrying thing is that the analysis relates to the past year, i.e. the time before the war in Ukraine, which made the situation significantly worse again.

Christian Schubert

Economic correspondent for Italy and Greece.

  • Follow I follow

"Acute hunger is reaching unprecedented levels and the global situation is getting worse," said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, a UN agency headquartered in Rome.

Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, conflicts, the climate crisis, Covid-19 and rising food and fuel costs "unleashed a perfect storm".

Millions of people in dozens of countries would be driven to the brink of starvation.

"We urgently need emergency aid to save these people from the abyss and overcome the global crisis before it is too late," Beasley demanded together with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other institutions.

According to the latest annual report, around 193 million people in 53 countries and territories will be affected by acute food insecurity in 2021.

This represents an increase of nearly 40 million people from the already alarming 2020 numbers. Of this group, 570,000 people in Ethiopia, southern Madagascar, southern Sudan and Yemen have been placed in the most vulnerable category of acute food insecurity (IPC /CH phase 5).

They urgently need help to prevent the collapse of their livelihoods, starvation and death.

Dramatic situation in Tigray

The situation is particularly dramatic in the Tigray region, where more than 400,000 people were acutely threatened by starvation last year or were already suffering from it.

That is almost four times as much as in South Sudan.

In the Ethiopian region, a local militia is fighting the country's army.

Human rights organizations have reported ethnic cleansing and serious human rights violations.

An estimated two million people were displaced by the civil war.

The nutrition experts have looked at the same group of 39 hard-hit countries since 2016, concluding that the number of people “in a crisis or worse situation” (IPC/CH level 3 or worse ), almost doubled between 2016 and 2021.

The food crises have a combination of causes: armed conflicts, extreme weather conditions, economic shocks and health crises.

The most important reason is man-made: According to the experts, conflicts are still the main cause of food insecurity.