COVID-19 hunger spike leaves 1 in 5 Africans malnourished

Global18beplay increased more in 2020 than in the previous five years put together, with much of the rise in hunger likely linked toCOVID-19, a multi-agency UNreport说。

Up to 811 million people were undernourished in 2020 – almost a tenth of the world’s population and a rise of around 161 million since 2019.

Hunger levels had already been on the rise for several years before the fallout from the global pandemic, driven byconflict,climateextremes and economic downturns.

“最近的《联合国报告》将数字显示给显而易见的人物：在大流行之前在营养上脆弱的社区，家庭，家庭和儿童现在更加脆弱。”

Claire Heffernan, director London International Development Centre

The biggest increase from the pandemic was seen in Africa, where 21 per cent of the population are estimated to beundernourished– more than double the prevalence of any other region.

Overall, more than half of all undernourished people – 418 million – live in Asia, and more than a third – 282 million – in Africa, while 60 million are in Latin America and the Caribbean.

But “no region of the world has been spared”, by rising hunger, the heads of five UN agencies wrote in the foreword to the report.

“The high cost of healthy diets and persistently high levels of poverty and income inequality continue to keep healthy diets out of reach for around 3 billion people in every region of the world,” they wrote.

该报告估计，在当前轨迹上年代DG2 – Zero Hunger by 2030 – will be missed by a margin of nearly 660 million people, of which about 30 million may be linked to the pandemic.

According to the report, more than 2.3 billion people — 30 per cent of the global population — lacked year-round access to adequate food. It said this figure, which indicates the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity, jumped as much in one year as the preceding five combined.

Childrenare among the most affected, whilegenderinequality has also deepened. More than 149 million under-fives were estimated to be stunted, or too short for their age, which can have lifelong consequences.

Meanwhile for every 10 food-insecure men, there were 11 food-insecure women, the report found, up from 10.6 in 2019.

Claire Heffernan, director of the London International Development Centre, told年代ciDev.Net: “The recent UN report puts figures to the obvious: communities, households, families and children who were nutritionallyvulnerable在大流行之前，现在更加脆弱。

“防止儿童陷入终生影响的阻碍之路是紧迫的重中之重。”

全球反食品危机网络将2021年及以后的前景描述为“严峻”。

“Conflict, pandemic-related restrictions fuelling economic hardship and the persistent threat of adverse weather conditions will likely continue driving food crises,” said a joint statement by the network and USAID, adding that these crises would become more frequent and more severe.

Nothing short of a “radical transformation” of theagri-foodsystem would lead to achieving the UN goal of ending hunger by 2030, they said in a statement released with the report.

The report comes ahead of three major UN summits later this year which leaders hoped will give the issue of food security some momentum —the UN Food Systems Summit,Nutrition for Growth Summit和COP26气候变化谈话。

The report outlines six “transformation pathways” which authors say rely on a “coherent set of policy and investment portfolios” to counteract the hunger and malnutrition drivers.

建议之一是扩大跨食品系统的气候弹性，包括开放气候风险保险和为小农提供基于预测的融资farmers. The need fordata解决问题的新技术也受到强调。