Nairobi, Kenya — Hospitals are flooded with starving children in Afghanistan. In the Horn of Africa, villagers trek for days through dusty wastelands to escape famine caused by drought. In cities from Syria to Central America, families go to bed hungry.
A grain ship leaving the Ukrainian port of Odessa on Monday for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine in February also held out a glimmer of hope that it might stem the global tide of hunger. Ukraine’s bloated stores housed her 20 million tons of grain, trapping trillions of calories until a diplomatic deal was brokered by Turkey and the United Nations last month. A further 16 grain vessels are set to depart in the near future to navigate the Black Sea mining waters.
But experts say resuming Ukrainian grain exports will have little impact on the global food crisis that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned could last for years. increase.
The scale of the crisis – caused by war, the economic blows from the Covid-19 pandemic and extreme weather often exacerbated by climate change – is so huge that no single advance is a silver bullet. Hmm.
Famine threatens 50 million people in 45 countries. according to United Nations World Food Programme. In the 20 worst-hit countries, the situation is likely to deteriorate significantly by the end of the summer.
That suffering is the extreme end of the expanding spectrum of hunger. His 828 million people, one-tenth of the world’s population, were undernourished last year, according to recent estimates from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
As for Ukrainian grains, aid experts say four years of drought have left 18 million people starving in places like the Horn of Africa, where more than half of the population is starving, and Afghanistan. It is not known how much help will reach people suffering from not eating enough.
Just ask Saad Ahmed.
Since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan a year ago, it has triggered an economic collapse and life has become an uphill battle for survival, Ahmed said. He hasn’t paid his rent for five months. He recently sold rugs to buy food for his six children.
And as hundreds lined up for food aid in the once-wealthy neighborhoods of the capital Kabul, Ahmed said he could not even rely on relatives, the usual safety net among Afghans. Told.
Coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian War
“They have nothing left,” he said. “How can I ask them for help?”
Funding for emergency aid is far behind. In Yemen, where 60% of her population depends on food aid, aid workers have cut rations to push more food aid.
Richard Reagan, director of the World Food Program in Yemen, said, “This is the only country I’ve worked in to feed the hungry from the hungry.” You need to do.”
Not long ago, the world was on track to end hunger.
Between 2005 and 2014, the number of undernourished people as measured by the Food and Agriculture Organization fell by nearly 30%, from 806 million to 572 million. The ambitious goal of ending world hunger by 2030, adopted at the 2015 Summit, seemed within reach.
But many of these gains came from China and India, where booming economies lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty. Progress has been very slow in Africa, where 20% of people face hunger.
War and extreme weather were the main causes. A surge in conflicts, cyclones, droughts and other natural disasters in Africa and the Middle East have hit a range of fragile countries, mostly near the equator.
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, disrupting livelihoods and driving up food prices. For Blanca Lydia Garrido Lopez, that meant cutting back on the family diet significantly.
A single mother of six, Garrido lives in Guatemala, one of the most unequal countries in Latin America, where she makes a living cleaning her home. As her pandemic progressed, her income collapsed as her clients fell ill or canceled her reservations.
Garrido stopped giving meat and poultry to children between the ages of 3 and 18. Even eggs and beans have become luxuries. “I live every day,” she said.
Some said 15 years of progress were undone last year when the number of hungry people in the United Nations surpassed 800 million. (As a result of population growth, the proportion of the world’s hungry people has fallen from 12% to 10%.)
It showed that chronic hunger — one that rarely makes headlines but is still life-threatening and sometimes deadly — is widespread.
In the village of Afotsifari on the southern tip of Madagascar, two-year-old Jenny Andriandrainy is having trouble walking and is showing signs of cognitive impairment due to malnutrition, doctors say. He is one of his 50 malnourished children in his district. Many were born during Madagascar’s devastating drought from 2018 to 2021.
Jenny’s pregnant mother sold twigs and searched for wild leaves in desperation to feed her family. When Jenny was born, he weighed barely 5 pounds. Many such children are more likely to die before the age of five.
Approximately 13.5 million children worldwide According to UNICEF, it is ‘grossly wasted’, United Nations Children’s Agency. According to UNICEF, the cost of saving one life is small. It’s about $100 for a nutritious food course.
Climate change from burning fuel is another factor. The world is warming, and the evaporation of water from fields is accelerating. Altering rainfall patterns can result in too much rain at the wrong time of year or too little when farmers need it.
World powers blame each other for the hunger crisis.
On the eve of her visit to Kenya and Somalia last month, U.S. Agency for International Development Director Samantha Power accused Russian President Vladimir V. Putin of “waging war on the world’s poor” through military operations in Ukraine. She also criticized China for giving just her $3 million to the World Food Program this year, while the US gave her $3.9 billion.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited four African countries last week, blaming the West for high food prices. He was warmly welcomed in Uganda, a U.S. ally, and in Ethiopia, in the northern Tigray region, where millions are threatened with famine.
For others, the Ukraine crisis shows that the international community can come together to solve humanitarian emergencies, but only if it is necessary.
As of Monday, the UN’s request for $2.2 billion in humanitarian aid to Ukraine was 93% met. according to United Nations Financial Tracking System. However, similar large-scale appeals against countries such as Sudan, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo received only 21-45% of the requested funds.
In April, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: Said This disparity raises the question, “Does the world really pay equal attention to the lives of blacks and whites?”
Ukrainian officials say they could ship 20 million tonnes within the next four months if their ships could continue to navigate the Black Sea – an uncertain bet against the instability of the war. But it’s also bad news for fragile countries.
Wheat prices have already fallen to pre-war levels, but fertilizer prices remain high, Maximo Torero, chief economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization, said in an interview.
This means that if Ukrainian and Russian grains surge on global markets, prices could fall further, benefiting consumers but hurting poor farmers who are already planting crops with expensive fertilizers. Tolero said it means that there is sexuality.
Moreover, there is no guarantee that Ukrainian wheat sold on the open market will go to the poorest countries. FAO is suggestionIt created a new financial institution to give 62 poor countries access to its grains and a global food reserve for aid groups such as the World Food Programme.
“It’s not that the deal is bad,” Torero said. “But that’s only one side of the problem.”
At Doctors Without Borders’ children’s ward in Herat, a city in western Afghanistan near the border with Iran, the conspiracies of the global grain market seem far away.
One morning in March, doctors swarmed around a malnourished one-year-old boy. His body was battered by measles and he was on the brink of death. A few hours later, in the bed next to him, a 7-month-old girl died from the same combination of illnesses. Then 11-month-old Hajera began to gasp sharply.
“My angel,” her mother, Zeinab, whispered as nurses tied an oxygen mask to her face and wrapped her little body in a hypothermic blanket.
Hajera survived that night, and the next.
But on the third day she also died.
The report was contributed by Lindsey Tutel in Johannesburg. Christina Goldbaum Yakoob Akbary in Kabul, Afghanistan. Asma Al Omar Beirut, Lebanon. Ruth McLean Dakar, Senegal. Jody Garcia in Miami. Somini Sengupta in Los Angeles. Oscar Lopez in New York; a New York Times employee in Damascus, Syria;
