Record number of people worldwide are moving toward starvation, U.N. warns
Sergei, 11, waits his turn to receive donated food during an aid humanitarian distribution in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, on Tuesday, April 19, 2022.
UNITED NATIONS — The spike in food, fuel and fertilizer prices sparked by the war in Ukraine is threatening to push countries around the world into famine, bringing "global destabilization, starvation and mass migration on an unprecedented scale," a top U.N. official warned Wednesday.
David Beasley, head of the U.N. World Food Program, said its latest analysis shows that "a record 345 million acutely hungry people are marching to the brink of starvation" — a 25% increase from 276 million at the start of 2022 before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. The number stood at 135 million before the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.
"There's a real danger it will climb even higher in the months ahead," he said. "Even more worrying is that when this group is broken down, a staggering 50 million people in 45 countries are just one step away from famine."
Beasley spoke at a high-level U.N. meeting for the release of the latest report on global hunger by the World Food Program and four other U.N. agencies that paints a grim picture.
The report, "The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World," says world hunger rose in 2021, with around 2.3 billion people facing moderate or severe difficulty obtaining enough to eat. The number facing severe food insecurity increased to about 924 million.
The prevalence of "undernourishment" — when food consumption is insufficient to maintain an active and healthy life — is used to measure hunger, and it continued to rise in 2021. The report estimates that between 702 million and 828 million people faced hunger last year.
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