Globally, 41 million people are in danger of sliding into famine and around $6.6 billion is needed to support them, according to three United Nations (UN) agencies.
In Africa, close to half a million people experience famine-like conditions in Ethiopia, Madagascar, and South Sudan.
Vulnerable populations in Burkina Faso and Nigeria have also been subjected to these same conditions.
The three UN agencies – UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) – have called for urgent humanitarian support.
They made the call at a virtual event on action against food insecurity. The meeting was convened in collaboration with the Group of Friends on Action on Conflict and Hunger.
Speaking at the event, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, noted that famine ‘goes viral in a way that other threats perhaps [do not]’.
Griffiths also said, ‘A toxic mix of economic decline, climate change, [Covid-19] and of course, most importantly, conflict driving this terrible scourge, with women and girls, as always, left particularly vulnerable’.
According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis, over 350,000 people face catastrophic famine conditions (phase five) and a further two million in phase four in crisis-ridden Tigray region.
The crisis started after the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the regional government in Tigray, attacked a key Ethiopian military base in the region.
‘Today we face unprecedented food crises on multiple fronts. Starvation and hunger-related deaths are a present reality, as we near the end of 2021, the situation has continued to deteriorate’, FAO Director-General, QU Dongyu, said.
In September 2021, WFP reported that 1.4 million children were suffering from acute malnutrition and 2.47 million people were at risk of famine in South Sudan.
A civil war raging since 2013 and a severe drought and catastrophic flooding in 2019 have exacerbated the country’s food insecurity outlook.
‘And the fact that we are sitting here begging for $6.6 billion to save 41 million people, and to keep nations from destabilising, and to prevent mass migration…I [do not] know what in the world I am missing’, the WFP Executive Director, David Beasley, said.
‘It is a disgrace that we are having this conversation’.
According to Beasley, there is $400 trillion of wealth in the world today and, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, billionaires were averaging a net worth increase of $5.2 billion a day.
‘[It is] a disgrace’, he said.
The UN Secretary-General has already established a High-level Task Force on Preventing Famine to bring attention to and mobilise support for the most-affected countries.
Photo source: Peter Casier
