One in 11 people worldwide suffered from hunger last year, while one in three struggled to afford a healthy diet. These numbers underline the fact that governments not only have little chance of a goaltaking place in 2015, of eradicating hunger, but progress on expanding food access has slowed.
The data, included in a United Nations report released Wednesday, also reveals something surprising: As global crises continue to deepen, issues such as hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition no longer stand alone as isolated measures of public health. In the eyes of the intergovernmental organizations and humanitarian institutions monitoring these challenges, access to food is increasingly intertwined with the impact of a warming world.
“The agri-food system operates under risk and uncertainties, and these risks and uncertainties are accelerated by climate [change] and the frequency of climate events,” said Máximo Torero Cullen, chief economist of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, in a briefing. It’s a “problem that will continue to grow,” he said, adding that the increasing effects of warming on global food systems creates a human rights issue.
Torero calls the crisis “an unacceptable situation that we cannot afford, both in terms of our society, in terms of our moral convictions, but also in terms of our economic returns.”
Of the approximately 733 million people who suffered from hunger last year, there were approximately 152 million more who faced chronic malnutrition than in 2019. (All told, about 2.8 billion people could not afford a healthy diet.) This is comparable to what was seen in 2008 and 2009, a period widely regarded as the last major global food crisis, effectively setting back the goal of equitable food access by 15 years. This insecurity remains worst in low-income countries, where 71.5 percent of residents struggled to buy enough nutritious food—compared to just 6.3 percent in rich countries.
Climate change is second only to conflict in having the greatest impact on global hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, according to the FAO. That’s because planetary warming does more than disrupt food production and supply chains through extreme weather conditions such as droughts. It promotes the spread of diseases and pests, affecting livestock and crop yields. And increasingly so cause people to migrate while fleeing their territories ravaged by rising seas and devastating stormswhich in turn can fuel conflict which then drives more migration in a vicious cycle.
“What happens if we don’t act and we don’t react?” said Torero. “You have more migration… it will empower more conflicts, because people who are hungry are more likely to be in conflict, because they have to survive. And it will also cause a greater frequency of conflicts.”
Earlier this year, the African countries Zambia and Zimbabwe a state of disaster as a result of a ongoing drought. Mercy Lung’aho, a food research scientist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, said she saw long lines of people waiting to buy food, with quotas on how much they could buy. “Imagine not being able to know when, or if, you are going to eat. This is the impact of climate change,” Lung’aho said.
Although governments, nonprofits, and other organizations spend large sums of money each year to solve these problems, no one can offer anything more than inconsistent estimates of exactly how much is being spent or what impact it is having. One reason for that, the UN report notes, is because there is little clarity about how this money is used, or even how these funding strategies are defined. (This is also true of multinational funding pledges to address these issues.) The authors of the report call for the adoption of a universal definition of financing for food security and nutrition that includes public and private resources aimed not only at eradicating hunger, but everything from strengthening agri-food systems to mitigating drivers such as climate shocks.
As it stands, the world is certainly not on track to achieve all seven global nutrition targets set by governments for 2030 under the Sustainable Development Goals that they adopted in 2015. But experts on the issue have long argued that such measures have always been more naive than realistic, with “overambitious and impossible” aimed at include eradicating hunger and malnutrition for all people, and doubling the agricultural productivity and income of small-scale producers, among other goals.
Nemat Hajeebhoy is the head of nutrition for UNICEF Nigeria, which the second largest population of malnourished children in the world. Unless governments, NGOs and the private sector come together to address the underlying causes of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, she said, vulnerable women and children worldwide will bear the brunt of that inaction. “What keeps me up at night are the numbers I see,” said Hajeebhoy. “As humans we must eat to live. And if we cannot eat, then the result is sickness and death.”
