Status: 07/12/2021 5:08 p.m.
According to the United Nations, the number of hungry people rose sharply in the Corona year 2020. According to this, up to 811 million people worldwide were undernourished – just under a tenth of the world’s population.
According to a UN report, hunger worldwide increased significantly in the year of the corona pandemic in 2020. It is estimated that between 720 and 811 million people were malnourished in the past year. This increased their share to just under ten percent of the world’s population, as the World Food Report shows.
According to the UN nutrition report, 800 million people worldwide are undernourished
Sabine Krebs, ARD Nairobi, daily news 8 p.m., July 12, 2021
This is 70 to 161 million more than in 2019, said experts from the World Food Organization FAO in the report. It was an increase of around 1.5 percentage points within a year. This was significantly higher than the previous year’s values, which were between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points.
Malnutrition in Africa is twice as high as in the rest of the world
The sharpest increase in the number of hungry people was therefore in Africa. The rate of malnutrition there was 21 percent, more than twice as high as in any other region of the world.
Worldwide, according to the report, 2.3 billion people, 30 percent of the population, did not have year-round access to adequate nutrition. This value rose as much in 2020 as in the five previous years combined.
Women were more likely to suffer from malnutrition than men. Malnutrition persisted in all forms. More than 149 million toddlers under the age of five had stunted growth and were too small for their age; over 45 million children were too thin. On the other hand, almost 39 million children were overweight. According to the information, three billion adults and children could not afford a healthy diet for financial reasons.
Pandemic is decisive for increasing hunger
The experts largely attributed the increase to the consequences of the Corona crisis, the effects of which would have to be investigated further, as they emphasized. According to the information, the pandemic triggered “brutal recessions” in many parts of the world and made food access difficult.
In addition, the pandemic is exposing the weaknesses in the food systems that threaten the lives and livelihoods of people around the globe, the report said.
According to current forecasts, the international community’s goal of stopping hunger by 2030 can only be achieved with “enormous efforts”. In particular, this would require drastic measures to remove inequalities in access to food.