Poor communities around the world are sending a clear, urgent and repeated message: “Hunger may kill us before coronavirus”. Combined with ongoing conflicts, spiraling inequality, and an escalating climate crisis, the pandemic has shaken an already broken food system to its foundations, leaving millions on the brink of starvation.
If we don’t act now, up to 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to the social and economic impacts of the pandemic before the end of the year, perhaps more than will die each day from the disease.
In the past months, we’ve taken extraordinary measures to try and bring the number of Covid-19 cases to zero.
Now, we need a similar massive effort to reduce hunger to zero.
In our deeply unequal world, millions of people are living in, and dying from, hunger every year. In 2019, 821 million people were estimated to be food insecure, of which approximately 149 million suffered crisis level hunger or worse.
This crisis is not about a lack of food. These devastating hunger levels are a symptom of a broken food system that has allowed millions of people to go hungry on a planet that produces more than enough food for everyone.
The coronavirus pandemic has added fuel to the fire of this growing hunger crisis. It has exacerbated existing inequalities and vulnerabilities while pushing millions of people into food insecurity as a result of spiraling unemployment and the economic disruption caused by the disease.
We have identified 10 countries and regions where the food crisis is most severe and getting worse because of the pandemic: Yemen, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Afghanistan, Venezuela, the West African Sahel, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria and Haiti. Together they account for 65 percent of people facing crisis level hunger globally. But new hunger hotspots are also emerging. Middle-income countries such as India, South Africa, and Brazil are experiencing rapidly rising levels of hunger.
