Food crises will affect tens of millions of people around the world this year, researchers warned today, as war, extreme weather events and economic crises in 2018 left behind more than 113 million people in great need of help.
Conflicts and insecurity were responsible for the desperate situation faced by 74 million people – or two-thirds of those affected – in 2018, the Food Safety Information Network (FSIN) reported in the annual Global Report on Food Crises.
FSIN is a global program funded by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Program (WFP) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
“The 113 million is what we now call the ‘tip of the iceberg’. If you look at the numbers, there are people who are not food insecure, but they are on the verge of it,” Luca Russo, senior FAO’s analyst on food crisis, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
These people, another 143 million, are so vulnerable that even a drought would be enough to make them sink into the food crisis, he says.
Source: ANA-MPA
