Healthy Food Is Becoming Increasingly Unaffordable

The latest edition of the ‘State of food security and nutrition in the world’ has found that the number of people affected by hunger globally has been slowly on the rise since 2014. The report, published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, estimates that almost 690 million people went hungry in 2019, an increase of almost 10% over the past five years. The high costs and low affordability of healthy and nutritious diets also continue to contribute to the malnutrition of billions of people.

More people around the world are going hungry, with tens of millions of people having joined the ranks of the chronically undernourished over the past five years. In the 2020 edition of the ‘State of food security and nutrition in the world’, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that almost 690 million people went hungry in 2019, which was up by 10 million from 2018, and nearly 60 million in five years. In addition, the report forecasts, the COVID- 19 pandemic could cause about 130 million more people to suffer from chronic hunger across the world by the end of 2020.

THE NUMBERS EXPLAINED

In total, the amount of people suffering from hunger worldwide was revised down from 820 million, as stated in the 2019 report, to the current 690 million. This 2020 estimate is based on new data on population, food supply and more importantly, new household survey data that enabled the revision of the inequality of food consumption for 13 countries, including China. Revising the undernourishment estimate for China going back to the year 2000 resulted in a significantly lower number of undernourished people worldwide. This is because China has one-fifth of the global population. Nevertheless, there has been no change in the trend. Revising the entire hunger series back to the year 2000 yields the same conclusion: after steadily diminishing for decades, chronic hunger slowly began to rise in 2014 and continues to do so. The new estimate for 2019 has revealed that an additional 60 million people have become affected by hunger since 2014. If this trend continues, the number of undernourished people will exceed 840 million by 2030.