Following a year of lockdowns and a stalling global economy, the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World research shows that an additional 118m people are going to bed hungry, an increase of 18% in one year. We are at an inflection point. We can either let hunger spiral out of control, causing untold misery, economic turmoil and social unrest. Or we can seize the moment and resolve to end it.
Lawrence Haddad, Executive Director GAIN, sends a strong call to action before the UN Food Systems Pre-Summit on July 26 in Rome:
"The SOFI 2021 hunger numbers are expected and shocking. Expected because how could hunger numbers not increase as GDP per capita goes down and poverty rates go up driven by climate, fragility, and COVID?
Shocking because the increases are greater than expected. Globally an additional 118m are going to bed hungry, an 18% increase in one year. And some of the regional increases are frightening (a 50% increase in Western Africa, 33% in Southern Africa and 35% in Latin America and the Caribbean).
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World research shows that an additional 118m people are going to bed hungry, an increase of 18% in one year. © Jay Clark / Unsplash
This demands an immediate and forceful response. We are at an inflection point. We can let hunger spiral out of control causing untold misery, economic turmoil and social unrest or we can seize the moment and resolve to end it by 2030. Let us look back from 2030 and say this was the point at which we chose to end hunger, forever."
There are many solutions appearing, and we remain hopeful that a global alliance to end hunger will bring together countries, civil society groups, businesses and development agencies to do three things:
- Advocate more strongly for hunger reduction
- Align resources around high impact investments to end hunger
- Bring additional resources to the table from now until 2030
We can let hunger spiral out of control causing untold misery, economic turmoil and social unrest or we can seize the moment and resolve to end it by 2030.