Human rights
UN report: More and more people around the world are in famine
Most hungry people lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo last year (25.8 million), followed by Nigeria, Sudan and Afghanistan. photo
© Kate Bartlett/dpa
The number of hungry people worldwide is growing every year and, according to the UN, there is no improvement in sight. The UN organizations report what the problem is.
The number of people in acute hunger situations worldwide rose to 281.6 million last year. That’s 24 million more than the year before, the UN World Food Program (WFP) and partner organizations said in their report on hunger crises worldwide. It says 700,000 people are on the verge of starvation, almost twice as many as a year before. The situation has improved in 17 countries, but has deteriorated significantly in twelve.
“The outlook for 2024 is bleak,” said Dominique Burgeon, head of the Geneva office of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In the The Gaza Strip is threatened with famine in just six weeks if more aid is not urgently brought to the cordoned off area, said Gian Carlo Cirri, director of the Geneva office of the UN World Food Program (WFP).
The reasons for hunger emergencies
According to the report, the main triggers for hunger crises were conflicts. This affected 135 million people. The second reason was economic shocks caused by inflation-related price increases or high national debts, which left governments no scope to take countermeasures. This affected 75 million people. In third place were weather disasters, which plunged 72 million people into misery. Governments and UN organizations must work more closely together to find peace and sustainable solutions to food security, the organizations demanded. In addition, the humanitarian appeals for donations amounting to 56 billion US dollars were only slightly more than 40 percent covered.
How emergencies are assessed
The authors follow the five-tier table of food security. Level 1 applies when there is enough food, level 5 corresponds to conditions similar to a famine. People in the top three categories are in acute food insecurity. They can either meet minimal food needs only through the sale of essential possessions (Stage 3), or the lack of food has already led to malnutrition (Stage 4), or in the worst case, they only have access to one or two food groups and more than 30 percent of people are acutely malnourished (level 5). Level 5 applied to the 700,000 who were on the verge of starvation. They lived in the Gaza Strip, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Somalia and Mali.
Where the situation is worst
Most hungry people lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo last year (25.8 million), followed by Nigeria, Sudan and Afghanistan. In terms of the proportion of hungry people in the total population, the situation was worst in the Gaza Strip, where a survey in December 2023 showed that all residents were in the highest three categories of the scale. Behind them were South Sudan, Yemen and Syria, where more than half of the people were in acute distress.