No work, no food: Coronavirus pandemic deepens global hunger

An estimated 270 million people are expected to face potentially life-threatening food shortages this year - compared to 150 million before the pandemic - according to analysis from World Food Program

The economic catastrophe set off by Covid-19, now deep into its second year, has battered millions of people. In South Africa and many other countries, far more have been pushed over the edge.
 
An estimated 270 million people are expected to face potentially life-threatening food shortages this year — compared to 150 million before the pandemic — according to analysis from the World Food Program, the anti-hunger agency of the United Nations. The number of people on the brink of famine, the most severe phase of a hunger crisis, jumped to 41 million people currently from 34 million last year, the analysis showed.

 
The World Food Program sounded the alarm further last week in a joint report with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, warning that “conflict, the economic repercussions of Covid-19 and the climate crisis are expected to drive higher levels of acute food insecurity in 23 hunger hot spots over the next four months,” mostly in Africa but also Central America, Afghanistan and North Korea.
 

The situation is particularly bleak in Africa, where new infections have surged. In recent months, aid organizations have raised alarms about Ethiopia — where the number of people affected by famine is higher than anywhere in the world — and southern Madagascar, where hundreds of thousands are nearing famine after an extraordinarily severe drought.

 
As another wave of the virus grips the African continent, the toll has ripped the informal safety net — notably financial help from relatives, friends and neighbors — that often sustains the world’s poor in the absence of government support. Now, hunger has become a defining feature of the growing gulf between wealthy countries returning to normal and poorer nations sinking deeper into crisis.
 
“I have never seen it as bad globally as it is right now,” Amer Daoudi, senior director of operations of the World Food Program, said describing the food security situation. “Usually you have two, three, four crises — like conflicts, famine — at one time. But now we’re talking about quite a number of significant of crises happening simultaneously across the globe.”                

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