UN warns: 345 million people face starvation worldwide

• Up to 345 million people are on the verge of famine.
• 70 million of those people are being pushed over the edge by the conflict in Ukraine.
• The world is facing a global emergency of unparalleled magnitude.

Up to 345 million people are on the verge of famine, with 70 million of those people being pushed over the edge by the conflict in Ukraine, according to the United Nations’ food chief, who has warned that the world is facing “a global emergency of unparalleled magnitude.”

In the 82 countries where the UN World Food Program operates, there are 345 million people who are acutely food insecure, which is more than twice the number of people who were in this situation prior to the COVID-19 pandemic’s arrival in 2020, according to David Beasley, executive director of the agency.

He stated that the fact that 50 million of those individuals live in 45 different nations and are “knocking on famine’s door” is quite alarming.

He pointed to escalating violence, the economic impacts of the pandemic, climate change, rising fuel prices, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying, “What was a wave of hunger is now a tsunami of famine.”

Beasley claimed that since Russia attacked its neighbor on February 24, rising prices for food, fuel, and fertilizer have brought 70 million people perilously close to hunger.

“There is a genuine and deadly potential of repeated famines this year,” he added, despite a July accord allowing Ukrainian grain to be carried through three Black Sea ports that Russia had blocked and ongoing efforts to get Russian fertilizer back onto international markets.

And if we don’t take action, the current food price issue might worsen into a food availability crisis in 2023.

Exhausted family at breaking point

More than 13 million people in the Tigray, Afar, and Amhara regions of northern Ethiopia require food that can save their lives, according to Griffiths.

In June, a survey conducted in Tigray revealed that 89 percent of the population experienced food insecurity, “more than half of them severely so.”

Beasley claimed that a truce in March made it possible for the World Food Program (WFP) and its partners to reach nearly five million people in the Tigray region, but the resumption of hostilities “threatens to push many hungry, tired families over the edge.”

According to UN estimates, 4.1 million people in northeast Nigeria experience high levels of food insecurity, including 588,000 who experienced emergency levels between June and August, according to Griffiths.

The UN worries that “some individuals may already be at the level of catastrophe and already dying” because nearly half of those people could not be reached due to insecurity.

Griffiths encouraged the Security Council to increase money for humanitarian operations and to “leave no stone unturned” in efforts to put an end to these hostilities, noting that UN appeals in all four of those countries “are all considerably below half of the required budget.”

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