The new United Nations (UN) World Hunger Index shows that no human being has to go hungry.
The fact that every tenth inhabitant of the planet is hungry is due to armed conflicts and climate change, but also to unfair distribution.
"Since 2000, global progress has been made in reducing hunger, which has been reduced by 32 percent worldwide," emphasizes Fraser Patterson of the World Food Program, a special body of the United Nations.
"We see progress in almost every country in the world," he says.
This organization, in cooperation with Concern Worldwide, publishes an index and report on the state of hunger in the world every year.
Three years ago, for example, there was not a single country in the world where the level of population hunger was so severe that the country had to be marked in red.
However, since 2017, hunger in the Central African Republic has again been marked in red: the general food situation is dire in this country torn by armed conflict.
Malnutrition is more the rule than the exception.
Every eighth child there dies before the age of five.
Those who survive mostly suffer from stunted growth and exhaustion.
In four other countries, the situation is very serious – in Chad, Madagascar, Yemen and Zambia.
In 43 out of a total of 117 countries included in the index, the situation is "serious".
According to the report, 822 million people worldwide suffer from hunger.
That's every eighth person in the world.
Three years ago, that number was below 800 million.
The situation worsened
"First of all, two factors play a role in the increase in the number of hungry people in the past three years: one is the effect of climate change, and the other is the increase in the number of armed conflicts around the world," says Patterson in an interview with Deutsche Welle.
The index has been published since 2006.
Since the early XNUMXs, severe weather events have doubled worldwide, says Patterson.
Huge harvest losses occur due to floods, soil erosion and storms.
"A higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to a decrease in micronutrients in crops, too little protein, zinc or iron," adds Patterson.
Philip Elston, the UN's special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, calls it "climate apartheid".
"We risk ending up in a situation of climate apartheid where the rich can afford to escape global warming, hunger and conflict while the rest of the world's population has to suffer because of climate change," Elston said.
In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Filip Mimkes from the Network for the Human Right to Food emphasizes that today there is much more food per capita in the world than ever before.
"This means that we don't have a production problem, but a distribution problem."
This expert indicates that less than half of agricultural production is used for human consumption.
"The rest ends up elsewhere, in bioplastics, in energy production, in animal feed."
That's why, according to him, only giving money that industries have been promising for decades does not help: "The most important causes of hunger are actually political issues such as discrimination, social inequality and unfair trade structures."
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