Coveted good: Basic foods such as grain are not available to all people. Every tenth person worldwide goes hungry.
Photo: dpa/AP/Sam Mednick
Around 735 million people are starving worldwide. Especially women and children are affected. This emerges from the current World Food Report of the United Nations (UN). According to this, 122 million more people suffered from hunger last year than before the corona pandemic. The UN actually wants to end global hunger by 2030.
Welthungerhilfe, one of the largest private aid organizations in Germany, opened its doors in Berlin on Thursday annual report presented. The organization fears that it will take much longer to establish global food security. Rather, she is concerned that the number of people going hungry around the world is stabilizing at too high a level. Welthungerhilfe President Marlehn Thieme explained in Berlin that the situation of starving people had even worsened worldwide in the past year. Multiple crises such as the consequences of climate change, armed conflicts and high food prices are driving more and more people to starvation. However, there is a lack of political will to combat poverty effectively.
Thieme explained that food prices had already reached record levels at the beginning of 2022. The war in Ukraine has also greatly increased the rise in food prices with significant nutritional problems for millions of families in southern Africa, Asia and the Arab world. Basic foods have become unaffordable in some cases and hunger is on the rise worldwide as a result.
Welthungerhilfe is committed to combating food shortages around the world, cooperating with 266 national aid organizations and, according to its own statements, supporting around 18.8 million people in 37 countries with 603 projects abroad. Most of the aid, a total of 185.1 million euros, went to 366 projects in Africa. According to the Secretary General of Welthungerhilfe, Mathias Mogge, the sub-Saharan countries are the focus of the work.
The current situation in Sudan is exemplary for the fatal effects of armed conflicts. “The heavy fighting and millions of people fleeing are enormous challenges in daily humanitarian aid.” Civil society actors are also increasingly restricted in their work as a result of the conflict. “In order to be able to fight hunger successfully, however, civil society must be able to review state structures and demand improvements,” he explained. However, this is not the case in many countries. In Afghanistan, the work ban for Afghan women excludes an entire population group, in India the government is questioning the scientific calculations in the Global Hunger Index, and in Mali and Burkina Faso the security situation, which is deteriorating every day, is making work more and more difficult for aid organization workers.
Climate change is also driving up the number of hungry people. East Africa, where already existing hunger crises are intensifying anyway, is particularly affected, as Marlehn Thieme explained: “The situation on the Horn of Africa has deteriorated dramatically. More than 36 million people are suffering from the worst drought in four decades.« The situation is still life-threatening, especially in northern Kenya, in many parts of Somalia, in southern Ethiopia and in northern Uganda. The soil is far too dry, there are too few harvests and not enough to eat. Many pastoral families have lost their livestock. »Famine crises develop into catastrophes.« In some regions, the droughts are accompanied by increased crime, which flares up due to scarce resources. Welthungerhilfe also fears that the El Niño weather phenomenon will mean heavy rainfall in the coming months: the drought could be followed by floods.
Despite all this, Welthungerhilfe is cautiously optimistic. »Hunger is one of the biggest solvable problems in the world. With the 2030 Agenda and the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, we have a good strategy for overcoming hunger in the long term,” it said in Berlin. But it takes “the political will and the consensus to implement the necessary measures,” says Thieme. This included sufficient funding and “fundamental reforms for a fair and sustainable food system”, which above all provided more support for people in rural areas.
Therefore, Welthungerhilfe again criticized the planned cuts in the federal budget for 2024 in development cooperation and humanitarian aid. These are “the wrong signal in times of greatest need,” complained the Welthungerhilfe President. Other aid organizations became even clearer in view of the current figures on global hunger. “We finally have to understand that hunger is not destiny,” says Philipp Mimkes, Managing Director of the human rights organization FIAN Germany. “Hunger is mostly a result of discrimination and exclusion. A mix of national policies and international agreements today unilaterally privileges industrial and corporate-dominated food systems: input-intensive agriculture, very long supply chains, global trade dominated by a few corporations, investment agreements or market-based responses to the climate crisis.«
In countries of the Global South, however, around two thirds of all food is produced by smallholders. Therefore, the focus should be on their rights and a move away from the dominance of large corporations, FIAN continues. Dagmar Pruin, the President of Bread for the World, also criticized global trade, which is mostly at the expense of the Global South: “In Africa, more and more people are starving, also because too much emphasis is placed on imports instead of local food production.” These one-sided dependencies of the global economy, as well as food speculation, are leading to massive increases in the price of staple foods and will further fuel hunger. No good prospects.