Thursday, 18 April 2019
Food crises will affect tens of millions of people across the world this year, researchers warn
Reuters, 2 April 2019:
ROME (Thomson Reuters
Foundation) - Food crises will affect tens of millions of people across the
world this year, researchers warned on Tuesday, after war, extreme weather and
economic woes in 2018 left more than 113 million in dire need of help.
Conflict and insecurity
were responsible for the desperate situation faced by 74 million people, or
two-thirds of those affected, in 2018, said the Global Network against Food
Crises in its annual report.
The Network’s members
include the United Nations’ Food aand Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World
Food Programme, and the European Union.
Analyzing 53 countries,
it uses a five-phase scale with the third level classified as crisis, fourth as
emergency and fifth as famine/catastrophe.
Luca Russo, FAO’s senior
food crises analyst, warned that millions more are now at risk of reaching
level three and above.
“The 113 million is what
we call the tip of the iceberg. If you look at the numbers further down, you
have people who are not food insecure but they are on the verge,” Russo told
the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
These people, a further
143 million, are “so fragile that it just takes a bit of a drought” for them to
fall into food crisis, he said.
“Unless we work
substantially on these people and remove some of the drivers that can bring
them to a worse situation, the overall numbers are likely to increase,” Russo
added.
Of countries that
suffered food crises in 2018, the worst affected was Yemen, where nearly 16
million people needed urgent food aid after four years of war, followed by the
Democratic Republic of Congo at 13 million and Afghanistan at 10.6 million.....
Labels:
climate change,
famine,
food security,
weather
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