One person in the world currently dies of hunger every four seconds, according to the most severe estimates of more than two hundred NGOs, which are calling on world leaders “to act to end the global hunger crisis”.
“Organizations from 75 countries have signed an open letter to express their outrage at the explosion in the number of hungry people and to make recommendations, as 345 million people around the world suffer from acute hunger, a number which has more than doubled since 2019”, underline these 238 organizations in an open letter, published as the UN General Assembly opens in New York, with food security on the planet as a critical point.
“It is inadmissible that with all the agricultural technology (…) today, we are still talking about famine in the 21st century,” said indignant Mohanna Ahmed Ali Eljabaly of the Yemen Family Care Association, one of the signatories of the letter.
And to add: “it is not a question of a country or a continent, and hunger never has a single cause.
It is about the injustice of all humanity”.
Armed conflicts and global warming
The signatories of the open letter detailed their calculation method in a footnote.
They draw on figures from the latest report in September from the Global Food Crises Network, established in 2016 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Program (WFP), the European Union and NGOs.
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A few months ago, the Global Network on Food Crises claimed that in 2021, up to 828 million people did not have access to healthy food, of which nearly 193 million people in 53 countries or territories had experienced acute food insecurity, 40 million more than in 2020. Of these people, 570,000 in Ethiopia, southern Madagascar, South Sudan and Yemen were considered to have reached the stage of famine, i.e. due to armed conflicts or due to drought and other consequences of global warming, causes to which the Covid pandemic has been added.
In Somalia, according to the latest WFP report from early September, 3.7 million people are receiving food aid and more than 300,000 treatment for malnutrition.
But other countries less exposed to the risk of war also have serious problems.
In Brazil, for example, an estimated 33.1 million Brazilians go hungry.