Paris: More than 113 million people across 53 countries experienced “acute hunger” last year because of wars and climate disasters, with Africa the worst-hit region, the United Nations (UN) said on Tuesday. Food crises will affect tens of millions of people across the world this year, the researchers warned.
Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan and Syria were among the eight nations accounting for two-thirds of the total number of people worldwide exposed to the risk of famine, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in its 2019 global report on food crises.
Conflict and insecurity were responsible for the desperate situation faced by 74 million people, or two-thirds of those affected, in 2018, said the Food Security Information Network’s (FSIN) annual Global Report on Food Crises.
The FSIN is a global project sponsored by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme and the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Analysing 53 countries, it uses a five-phase scale with the third level classified as a crisis, fourth as emergency and fifth as famine/catastrophe.
“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,” Luca Russo, FAO’s senior food crises analyst, 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 a food crisis, he said.
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Ms Kalinga