Families in Yemen receive food aid UN report: Number of hungry people has doubled in a year Humanitarian aid
The number of people living in conditions of catastrophic food shortages has doubled in the past year, according to the Global Report on Food Crises, presented in New York on Thursday. Experts from several UN agencies took part in the work on the document.
The UN has a complex scale for determining hunger levels. The lowest, level five, means people simply have nothing to eat and are sick and dying from malnutrition. According to Maximo Torero, chief economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the number of such people on earth has increased from 705,000 in 2023 to 1.9 million in 2024. The main reasons for such a rapid increase are the conflicts in Gaza and Sudan, as well as the drought caused by El Niño and rising food prices.
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Arif Hussain, chief economist of the World Food Programme (WFP), drew attention to the growing number of displaced people. “In 2023, there were 90 million internally displaced people, and in 2024, this figure has increased to 99 million,” he noted.
Victor Aguayo, UNICEF’s director of child nutrition and development, focused on the plight of children. He warned that in eight countries, the situation with child wasting has reached a “critical threshold.” Particularly alarming data comes from Cameroon, Chad and Yemen.
Aguayo called the conditions in Gaza, where war has been going on since October 7 last year, “one of the worst food crises in history.” According to him, extremely meager monotonous food is all that 90 percent of children in the enclave can currently get. More than 50,000 young Gazans are suffering from acute malnutrition and need immediate treatment, the UNICEF representative added.