FAO: The number of severely food insecure people in the world has increased by 22 percent

“The number of people who are severely food insecure and in need of urgent food, nutrition and livelihood assistance increased for the fourth year in a row in 2022, with more than a quarter of a billion people facing acute hunger and people in seven countries on the brink of starvation ", the document says.

According to the report of the Global Network to Combat Food Crises (GNAFC), an international alliance of the UN, the EU, governmental and non-governmental organizations involved in food crises, 258 million people are severely food insecure. According to FAO, this means that the inability to consume enough food endangers a person's life or their livelihoods. Under the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC or IPC), this situation corresponds to stages three through five of food insecurity.

More than 40% of the severely food insecure lived in just five countries: Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, parts of Nigeria and Yemen, according to the report.

Residents of seven countries have experienced catastrophic levels of acute hunger: more than half of them are in Somalia (57%), "with such extreme circumstances also occurred in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Haiti (for the first time in the country's history), Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen," the report says.

Speaking of rising hunger, the report says that "economic shocks have surpassed conflicts as the main cause of severe food insecurity."

"The cumulative global economic shocks, including soaring food prices and severe market disruptions, are undermining the resilience of countries and their ability to respond to food shocks," the document says.

According to the report's findings,Ukraine "had a negative impact on global food security due to the significant contribution of Ukraine and RUSSIA to the world production and trade in fuel, agricultural inputs and basic food commodities, especially wheat, corn and sunflower oil," the explanatory note says.

The conflict in Ukraine has disrupted agricultural production and trade in the Black Sea region, causing an unprecedented spike in global food prices in the first half of 2022. Although prices have sincefood security have declined, including thanks to the Black Sea Grain Initiative and EU projects, the conflict continues to indirectly affect food security, especially in low-income countries dependent on food imports, whose fragile economic resilience has already been hit by the covid-19 pandemic, the report says .