Covid Exacerbates World Hunger

At least 828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021, according to a recent report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). That's "46 million more than 2020 and 150 million more than in 2019."

Nowhere does the problem have a larger scale than on the African continent. According to FAO, about 58 percent of the population there is experiencing moderate (34 percent - including not enough money for healthy food, self-sufficiency problems, having to skip meals) or severe (23 percent - including no food stocks, entire days without food) food insecurity (FAO's definition). This represents an increase of 5.4 percentage points from the last pre-Covid year. Only in one world region is the growth more pronounced. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the affected share of the population grew by almost nine percent.

According to the FAO: "Despite hopes that the world would emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021 and food security would begin to improve, world hunger rose further in 2021. The increase in global hunger in 2021 reflects exacerbated inequalities across and within countries due to an unequal pattern of economic recovery among countries and unrecovered income losses among those most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic."