In the year 2021, the situation of hunger in the world has worsened. About 2.3 billion people had to face difficulties in procuring food. This happened before the Ukraine war that increased the cost of grain, fertilizer and energy. This information came out in a United Nations report.
The heads of the five UN agencies that published the report said the state of food security and nutrition in the world paints a grim picture based on the 2021 data. It said the figures should dispel any doubts that the world is lagging behind in its efforts to end hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition.
According to the report, the most recent available evidence suggests that the number of people unable to afford healthy diets worldwide increased by 112 million to nearly 3.1 billion, reflecting the effects of rising consumer food prices during the COVID-19 pandemic. The war in Ukraine, which began on February 24, is disrupting supply chains and further affecting prices of grain, fertilizer and energy, the report said. This has resulted in higher price increases in the first half of 2022. At the same time, rapid and severe climate-related events are also disrupting supply chains, especially in low-income countries.
Ukraine and Russia together produced about a third of the world’s wheat and barley and half of the sunflower oil. At the same time, Russia and its ally Belarus are the number 2 and 3 producers of potash in the world. Potash is a major component of fertilizers. According to the report, hunger conditions increased in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean region in 2021, albeit at a slower rate than in 2019 to 2020. It said that in 2021, starvation affected 278 million people in Africa, 425 million in Asia, and 5.65 billion people in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The United Nations’ development goals call for an end to extreme poverty and hunger by 2030, but the report says estimates indicate that 8 percent of the world’s population, some 67 million people, will be unable to gather food at the end of the decade. Must be facing difficulty. These are the same number of people as they were in 2015, when the goals were adopted. The report said the gender gap in food insecurity, which widened during the COVID-19 pandemic, has widened from 2020 to 2021.