ROME: A goal to eliminate global hunger by 2030 looks increasingly impossible to achieve, with the number of people suffering chronic hunger barely changed over the past year, a UN report said on Wednesday (Jul 24).
The annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report said around 733 million people faced hunger in 2023 – one in 11 people globally and one in five in Africa – as conflict, climate change and economic crises take their toll.
David Laborde, director of the division within the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which helps prepare the survey, said that although progress had been made in some regions, the situation had deteriorated at a global level.
“We are in a worse situation today than nine years ago when we launched this goal to eradicate hunger by 2030,” he told Reuters, saying challenges such as climate change and regional wars had grown more severe than envisaged even a decade ago.
If current trends continue, about 582 million people will be chronically undernourished at the end of the decade, half of them in Africa, the report warned.
A broader objective to ensure regular access to adequate food has also stalled over the past three years, with 29 per cent of the global population, or 2.33 billion people, experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity in 2023.
Underscoring stark inequalities, some 71.5 per cent of people in low-income countries could not afford a healthy diet last year, against 6.3 per cent in high-income countries.
While famines are easy to spot, poor nutrition is more insidious but can nonetheless scar people for life, stunting both the physical and mental development of babies and children, and leaving adults more vulnerable to infections and illnesses.
