The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) mandated that by 2030, the world should end hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition, but we seem to be moving further away from this goal than towards it.
The report's findings show that Africa, the world’s second-largest continent, is getting hungrier instead of improving. It is the only continent where the number of hungry people will increase, according to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 (SOFI 2022), released this month.
The SOFI, the annual assessment of the progress of all UN Member States toward the Sustainable Development Goals warned about the slow progress being made to end hunger globally, including in Africa.
Some 310.7 million of the 669.1 million undernourished people worldwide in 2030 will be in Africa. The report also revealed Africa’s grim picture in 2021, when it bore the heaviest burden of hunger globally. One in five Africans faced hunger in 2021.
Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for close to 94% of these 278 million people, an increase of 84.8 million since 2015.
In 2021, 136.4 million undernourished people lived in eastern Africa, followed by middle Africa (60.7 million), western Africa (57.3 million) and southern Africa (6.3 million).
East Africa is struggling under a severe drought, the region's worst in forty years. According to recent Oxfam estimates, one person is likely to die of hunger every 48 seconds in drought-ravaged East African countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.
In contrast, the total number of hungry people will decrease in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean by 2030.
The Sustainable Development Report 2022, the annual assessment of the progress of all UN Member States towards the SDGs, also warned about the slow progress being made to end hunger globally, including in Africa.
Three factors - conflict, climate change and economic slowdown, including those triggered by the Covid pandemic, are responsible for the rise in food insecurity and the number of people going hungry.
The SOFI has used the Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) to estimate the extent of hunger in the world. Thus, “hunger” may also refer to undernourishment. PoU is the estimate of the proportion of the population that does not have access to adequate dietary energy.
SOFI 2022 was jointly published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the UN World Food Programme and the World Health Organization.
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