One in five Africans go hungry as global crises bite - UN

LAGOS - The world is breaking its promise to end global hunger this decade, the United Nations (U.N.) said on Wednesday, with conflict, climate shocks and economic crises leaving one in five Africans short of food.

Global hunger levels have stayed broadly steady for the past three years, said the U.N. in its wide-ranging report, despite pledges to resolve the problem by 2030.

The issue is global but Africa is at the epicentre of the crisis, with hunger on the rise across the continent, according to the State of Global Hunger and Nutrition report.

A world in flux - be it roiled by war, climate change or economic shocks - has only exacerbated deep-seated inequalities, said the report, which was produced by five U.N. agencies.

And those inequalities have worsened all types of hunger.

The U.N. classifies hunger as chronic or acute and calls it a state of lacking sufficient food. A person is malnourished when their diet is unbalanced and short of key nutrients, which can lead to stunting, wasting, obesity or being overweight.   

Here are some of the report's key findings on Africa:

    -  Last year, more than 700 million people, or about 9% of the world's population, were suffering from hunger, up from 7.5% in 2019.

    - Of all the world's continents, Africa has the largest proportion of hungry people (20.4%), against 8.41% in Asia, and 6.2% in Latin America and the Caribbean combined.

    - Last year, an estimated 300 million people lacked sufficient food in Africa, up from 282 million people in 2022.

   - Some 582 million people will be chronically undernourished by 2030, more than half of whom are living in Africa.

    - An estimated 2.8 billion people in the world could not afford a healthy meal in 2022, with poor countries the worst affected. Across Africa, 924.8 million people could not afford a healthy meal in 2022 - up from 900.2 million in 2021.

    - While hunger levels remained unchanged in Southern Africa, things got worse in Central and West Africa, the crisis affecting a combined 132 million people continent-wide.

    - East Africa has the continent's highest number of hungry people, with more than 138 million people affected last year.

Source: The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024 report, produced by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), World Food Programme (WFP) and World Health Organization (WHO).

(Reporting by Bukola Adebayo; Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths)