The global hunger crisis has left more than 700 million people not knowing when or if they will eat again, and demand for food is rising relentlessly while humanitarian funding is drying up, the World Food Program (WFP) Executive Director, Cindy McCain, has said.
At the halfway point to the deadline set for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the world is seeing little to no improvement in most of the food and agriculture-related goals, according to another report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, released ahead of a UN sustainable development summit next week in New York.
“The lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with other crises such as climate change and armed conflicts, are having widespread impacts,” the report said. “Progress made in the past two decades has stagnated, and in some cases even reversed.”
Global food insecurity spiked sharply in 2020 as the pandemic disrupted food markets and drove up unemployment, but hunger has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. About 29.6% of the global population - 2.4 billion people - was moderately or severely food insecure in 2022, up from 1.75 billion in 2015, the report said.
Undernourishment is worst in the global south, with hunger rising most in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The world has also seen no improvement towards a goal to halve food waste, which has remained at about 13% since 2016. Countries should craft policy to reduce food loss, the report said.
For her part, McCain, the widow of the late US senator John McCain, said Thursday that because of the lack of funding, the agency has been forced to cut food rations for millions of people, and “more cuts are on the way.”
“We are now living with a series of concurrent and long-term crises that will continue to fuel global humanitarian needs,” she told the UN Security Council. “This is the humanitarian community’s new reality — our new normal — and we will be dealing with the fallout for years to come.”
The WFP chief said the agency estimates that nearly 47 million people in over 50 countries are just one step from famine — and a staggering 45 million children under the age of five are now estimated to suffer from acute malnutrition.
According to WFP estimates from 79 countries where the Rome-based agency operates, up to 783 million people — one in 10 of the world’s population — still go to bed hungry every night. More than 345 million people are facing high levels of food insecurity this year, an increase of almost 200 million people from early 2021 before the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency said.
At the root of the soaring numbers, WFP said, is “a deadly combination of conflict, economic shocks, climate extremes and soaring fertilizer prices.”
The economic fallout from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have pushed food prices out of the reach of millions of people across the world at the same time that high fertilizer prices have caused falling production of maize, rice, soybeans and wheat, the agency said.
“Our collective challenge is to ramp up the ambitious, multi-sectoral partnerships that will enable us to tackle hunger and poverty effectively, and reduce humanitarian needs over the long-term,” McCain noted.
The Security Council meeting was also attended by Michael Miebach, CEO of Mastercard, who said that “humanitarian relief has long been the domain of government” and development institutions, and the private sector was seen as a source of financial donations for supplies.
“Money is still important, but companies can offer so much more,” he said. “The private sector stands ready to tackle the challenges at hand in partnership with the public sector.”
Miebach stressed that “business cannot succeed in a failing world” and humanitarian crises impact fellow citizens of the world. A business can use its expertise, he said, to strengthen infrastructure, “innovate new approaches and deliver solutions at scale” to improve humanitarian operations.
Jared Cohen, president of global affairs at Goldman Sachs, told the Council that the revenue of many multinational companies rivals the GDP of some of the Group of 20 countries with the largest economies.
“Today’s global firms have responsibilities to our shareholders, clients, staff, communities, and the rules-based international order that makes it possible for us to do business,” he said.
Cohen said businesses can fulfill those responsibilities during crises first by not scrambling “to reinvent the wheel every time,” but by drawing on institutional memory and partnering with other firms and the public sector.
He said businesses also need “to act with speed and innovate in real time,” use local connections, and bring their expertise to the humanitarian response.
Lana Nusseibeh, the United Arab Emirates ambassador, said the UN appealed for over $54 billion this year, “and until now, 80% of those funds remain unfulfilled,” which shows that “we are facing a system in crisis.”
She said public-private partnerships that were once useful additions are now crucial to humanitarian work.
Her US counterpart, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said the funding gap has left the world’s most vulnerable people “in a moment of great peril.”
She said companies have stepped up, including in Haiti and Ukraine and to help refugees in the United States, but for too long, “we have turned to the private sector exclusively for financing.”
Meanwhile, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned that halfway through the 2030 Agenda, the world is today far from meeting the climate targets within the Sustainable Development Goals.
It said this failure to meet the goals and undermines global efforts to tackle hunger, poverty and ill health, improve access to clean water and energy, and many other aspects of the 2030 Agenda.
In a joint report prepared by 18 specialized organizations, WMO said that barely 15% of the sustainable goals is progressing.
The report specified that 2023 has demonstrated all too clearly that climate change is already here, record temperatures scorching the earth and warming the sea, while extreme weather conditions wreak havoc across the planet.
WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said revolutionary scientific and technological advances, such as high-resolution climate modeling, artificial intelligence and current forecasting, can catalyze the transformation to achieve the goals.
He also noted that a Universal Early Warning System, to be achieved by 2027, would not only save lives and livelihoods, but would also help safeguard sustainable development.
