Fight against hunger: progress against hunger – but not everywhere

Last year, around 673 million people in the world suffered from hunger – about 22 million fewer than in the previous year. This emerges from the world nutrition report, which five UN agencies have presented in Ethiopian Addis Ababa.

According to the report, progress in the fight against hunger, especially in South Asia, Southeast Asia and South America, even if 8.2 percent of the world’s population could not be fed up. But successes could not be achieved everywhere: hunger increased against the global trend in Africa and in West Asia.

Rising food prices are a big problem

According to the report, around 2.3 billion people in the world lived under medium to serious food uncertainty. This means that they either did not have sufficient foods or not foods of sufficient quality. Rising food prices also contributed to the fact that many people could not adequately afford some – especially healthier and high -quality – foods.

“Countries and municipalities with low incomes bear the main load of hunger, nutritional uncertainty and malnutrition and are disproportionately affected by food price inflation,” said the report. Poor households therefore spend a larger part of their income for food. Even low price increases could make food unaffordable.