Climate, conflict, and debt keep hunger and malnutrition stubbornly high globally

The world is woefully off track when it comes to eliminating hunger and malnutrition, with one in 11 people going hungry in 2023 – a level that has remained unchanged for three consecutive years – and more than one in four slashing the quantity and quality of the food they consume or skipping meals, data from a UN flagship report shows.

Africa is the worst affected region, with one in five people facing hunger and more than one in two eating less or none at all for days at a time, said The State of Food Insecurity and Nutrition in the World (SOFI), released today.

More than a third of the global population – about 2.8 billion people – could not afford a healthy diet in 2022, and rates of adult obesity and anaemia among women are rising, according to the annual report, which was produced by five UN agencies.

“Hunger level remains high, higher than in 2015, when we launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and actually as high – in terms of percentage of the global population – as in 2009, 15 years ago, when we were dealing with the aftermath of the Great Recession born from the subprime crisis,” said David Laborde, director of the Agrifood Economics Division at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which oversaw the production of the SOFI report. Under the SDGs, governments pledged to end hunger by 2030.

“Numbers have plateaued, so we have stopped the bleeding, but the patient is far from proper recovery,” Laborde told The New Humanitarian in an email interview. “We need to scale up the treatment, and not just on the symptoms, but also on the root causes.”

Those root causes are conflicts, climate change, and economic upheaval, and they are “increasing in frequency and intensity” and “occurring concurrently more often”, said the report. Despite this, they are often not adequately addressed in official development assistance (ODA) and governments in low-income countries do not have the capacity to do so, it added.

Rich countries should be doing much more, including boosting the resilience of local food systems, fulfilling promises to increase ODA, and releasing poor nations from their heavy debt burdens, said international aid agencies such as Oxfam and Action Against Hunger.

Developed countries have failed to meet long-standing pledge to provide $100 billion in climate finance, said Hanna Saarinen, food policy lead for Oxfam International.

“Quite simply, there is a lack of political will to allocate sufficient political attention and financial resources to tackle hunger,” she told The New Humanitarian.

Charles Owubah, chief executive officer of Action Against Hunger USA, agreed.

“The issue of hunger today is not what to do” but “weak political will”, he said. “Food and proper nutrition are the foundation upon which global productivity rests. So we should reclassify our priorities and make it number one, because if they are addressed, health issues are addressed as well. The hunger crisis is also a health crisis.” 

Emerging hunger hotspots

Over the past two years, The New Humanitarian has been documenting how wars, climate extremes, international trade, agricultural policies, and national debt affect hunger through our “Emerging hunger hotspots” series of articles.

The eight middle- and lower-middle-income countries covered – Sri Lanka, Peru, Egypt, Georgia, Argentina, Ghana, the Philippines, and Pakistan – not only span the globe but also have starkly different geographies, climate, culture, and political systems. Yet what is most striking is their commonalities.

In all countries, soaring inflation and stagnant incomes have put healthy food out of reach for many people, while a reliance on global markets to feed the population has made them hostages to either spiking import bills or market volatility.

Diets heavy in starch and input-intensive agriculture caused many nations to depend on a handful of countries for staples and farm inputs, but this trade was disrupted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A large number of food- and fertiliser-importing countries had relied on these two key agricultural exporters for supplies.

Compounding the challenges are high levels of public debt and wild weather patterns that are either already reducing crop yields or threatening to do so. At least four countries – Sri Lanka, Argentina, Ghana, and Pakistan – were facing significant debt distress.

Data from the latest SOFI report showed the situation has not improved. In all countries except the Philippines, which does not have available data, the percentage of people who are eating less or lower quality food, or not eating at all, grew between the years 2021 and 2023 compared to 2014-2016. Adult obesity figures have risen in every single country, and a majority are also seeing an increase in the absolute number of women with anaemia and people who cannot afford healthy diets.

Aid workers say the heavy debt burden, in particular, is preventing countries from helping their citizens more. The recent deadly protests in Kenya against a tax bill proposed by the cash-strapped government illustrate the challenges governments are facing.

Saarinen said Oxfam’s own calculation showed low- and middle-income countries paid $106 billion in debt repayments and interest to G7 countries in 2023. Taking into account a 2020 report by development and food policy experts which estimated that approximately $330 billion in additional funding over 10 years could help the world reach global goals to tackle climate change and end hunger, the significance of the debt burden is clear, she added.

“There are countries who spent more on debt and debt reimbursements than they spent on health and education combined,” Saarinen said. “So we do call for rearrangement and debt cancellation for such unsustainable situations.”

The cost of delayed action is clear: A newer estimate found lifting 700 million people out of hunger and malnutrition by 2030 would require $512 billion over a six-year period between 2025 and 2030.

Can the world course-correct?

Laborde agreed that tackling the debt issue is a priority but said it should be done in a way that doesn’t frighten investors, “since we need to attract more investment in these countries”. This requires both global solidarity and more innovative financial solutions: The latter is the theme of this year’s SOFI, which provided a number of options for different countries and also came up with a new definition for measuring how much funding is dedicated to food security and nutrition.

The report also criticised the current financing structure on these issues as ineffective due to fragmentation; lack of consensus on priorities; and the prevalence of numerous actors delivering mostly small, short-term projects. In addition, only 34% of the ODA currently going to food security and nutrition helps address the major drivers and underlying factors such as persistent inequality and unhealthy food environments.

Transformative policies may cost billions of dollars, but “the cost of not financing them would easily be in the trillions”.

One of the biggest obstacles is the lack of financing options for nearly two thirds of the 119 low- and middle-income countries, which also tended to be affected by one or more major drivers and where hunger and child stunting tend to be much higher, according to the UN.

For these countries, the report recommends a raft of financial innovations: grants and low- or no-interest loans with technical assistance from international development flows; debt-for-development swaps and special drawing rights (an international reserve currency created by the International Monetary Fund); and insurance and guarantees on investments related to improving food security and nutrition. It is crucial to make these instruments available to populations facing more difficulty accessing financial services, such as women, Indigenous peoples, smallholder farmers, and small and medium agrifood enterprises, it said.

Transformative policies may cost billions of dollars, but “the cost of not financing them would easily be in the trillions”, warned the UN, which said in a previous report that the hidden costs of the current agrifood systems on public health, environment, and society amount to at least $10 trillion a year.

“The more we wait, the more we will need to spend because the problems get worse, and we have potentially less time to deliver (and therefore we have to rely on less cost effective solutions),” said Laborde.

The financing is all the more important because climate change would further worsen global hunger and malnutrition, aid agencies warned.

Action Against Hunger’s Obuwah, who was born in Ghana, remembered a nearby stream he used to fetch water from that flowed at a steady pace throughout the year.

“Not long ago, I visited and that has shrunk significantly. Another time, that same stream [had] burst its banks and was flooding all over,” he said. “The extremes right in the village where I grew up… are making agriculture very unpredictable because in many of those villages, it's all rain-fed agriculture. It’s about the timing, knowing when to prepare the land and getting your seeds ready for the first rains.”

Now, the rains are becoming erratic. If they come early, farmers have not finished preparing the land, and, if they come late, the plants will die before the rains. Droughts are also becoming more common.

“Take Ghana, Pakistan, or Egypt. We're talking of sunlight being available 12 months of the year. Soils are relatively good. What’s the challenge? They don’t have irrigation,” said Obuwah. “They're still dependent on rain-fed agriculture at a time when we have climate extremes.”

Edited by Andrew Gully.