World is losing battle to wipe out hunger by end of decade: Report

By Agnieszka de Sousa

The world risks losing its battle to end hunger by the end of the decade, despite signs that the crisis has stopped worsening.

The lingering fallout from the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine means about 735 million people — or 9.2% of the population — were undernourished in 2022, according to United Nations agencies. While that’s slightly less than a year earlier, it was 122 million more than in 2019 and means the world remains far off a target to eradicate hunger by the end of this decade.

Access to food is being stifled by the prolonged impact of the Covid crisis on incomes and economies, as well as soaring food and energy costs that have been compounded by the war in Ukraine. The rising cost of a healthy diet and inflation also mean about 2.4 billion people were without access to nutritious, safe and sufficient food all year round, the agencies said in an annual report.

Almost 600 million people will still face hunger in 2030, 119 million more than in a scenario in which neither the pandemic nor the war in Ukraine had occurred, the report showed. That means the world is a long way off a goal to eliminate hunger by that year.

Hunger was still rising in western Asia, the Caribbean and throughout Africa last year. While most undernourished people live in Asia, the continent has made progress in reducing hunger, as has Latin America, the UN agencies said. 

The number of undernourished people globally — defined as those regularly without enough calories to lead a normal and healthy life — is a midrange of estimates between 691 million and 783 million people.

The UN’s flagship State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report was jointly produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Food Programme, Unicef and the World Health Organization.

Other takeaways from the report:

• Some 148 million children under 5 — more than one-fifth — were stunted last year, meaning they were too short for their age.
• About 45 million of children under 5 were too too thin for their height and 37 million were overweight.
• The prevalence of overweight children is at risk of rising with the emerging problem of high consumption of highly processed foods and food away from home in urban areas, which is increasingly spreading into rural regions.
• “Steady” progress has been made on levels of exclusive breastfeeding.