The war on hunger is becoming a rout—and we’re losing. The UN World Food Program (WFP) announced today that during the last two years 200 million more people are going hungry.
Josette Sheeran, executive director of the WFP, said that a number of factors have led to the continuing rise of hunger in the world, including falling incomes, higher fuel costs, and climate change. Sheeran said that four times as many natural disasters were occurring every year than occurred twenty years ago.
In addition, despite the financial crisis, food staple prices in the developing world continue to rise.
“The food crisis is not over,” Sheeran said. “For 80 per cent of communities in the developing world, prices are higher than they were a year ago … You add the financial crisis and people’s incomes are getting hit. Remittances are slowing down, investment is slowing down and day labour jobs are slowing down. This is why we have a full-blown crisis.”
The number of hungry people has risen over one billion in the world.
“One out of six people in humanity will wake up not sure that they can even fill a cup of food,” Sheeran said. “We have to make no mistake that hunger is on the march.”
Related articles
Alleviating poverty and saving biodiversity are inherently linked argue scientists
(09/17/2009) Twenty-nine scientists argue in Science today that the world will not be able to lift up the world’s poor unless it also addresses global biodiversity loss. They say that the same underlying problems—exploitation of resources, unsustainable overconsumption, climate change, population growth—are exacerbating global poverty and the extinction of species.
(09/15/2009) A group of environmental scientists and economists warn that under current governing models the number and scale of human-caused crises are “outrunning our ability to deal with them”.
Record hunger: one billion people are going hungry worldwide
(06/22/2009) A new estimate by the UN FAO estimates that one billion people are currently going hungry: the highest number in history. Largely exacerbated by the global economic crisis, the number of the world’s hungry has risen by 100 million people.
