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Published: 17:02, May 04, 2022 | Updated: 23:13, May 04, 2022
UN agency: Urgent action needed to tackle food insecurity
By Reuters
Published:17:02, May 04, 2022 Updated:23:13, May 04, 2022 By Reuters

A man works at a grain mill in Addis Ababa, on June 12, 2021. (EDUARDO SOTERAS / AFP)

LONDON - Conflict, extreme weather and economic shocks increased the number of people facing food crises by a fifth to 193 million last year and the outlook will worsen without urgent action "on a massive scale," a humanitarian agency said on Tuesday.

The Global Network Against Food Crises, set up by the United Nations and the European Union, said in its annual report that food insecurity had nearly doubled in the six years since 2016 when it began tracking it.

Defined as any lack of food that threatens lives, livelihoods or both, acute food insecurity at crisis levels or worse grew by 40 million people or 20 percent last year

"The outlook moving forward is not good. If more is not done to support rural communities, the scale of the devastation in terms of hunger and lost livelihoods will be appalling," the GNAFC report said.

"Urgent humanitarian action is needed on a massive scale to prevent that from happening."

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Defined as any lack of food that threatens lives, livelihoods or both, acute food insecurity at crisis levels or worse grew by 40 million people or 20 percent last year.

Looking ahead, the report said the conflict between Ukraine and Russia - both countries are major food producers - poses serious risks to global food security, especially in food crisis countries including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Haiti, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

In 2021, Somalia got more than 90 percent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo received 80 percent, while Madagascar imported 70 percent of the food staple from the two countries.

READ MORE: UN chief: Conflict in Ukraine aggravating triple crisis in Africa

"Countries already coping with high levels of acute hunger are particularly vulnerable to (the conflict) due to their high dependency on imports of food and (their) vulnerability to global food price shocks," the report said.


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