José María Medina Rey
Head of knowledge management - Enraíza Derechos
In 2016, at the initiative of the European Union, the FAO and the WFP, the Global Network Against Food Crises was established and began producing an annual “Global Report on Food Crises”. The 2021 edition noted that in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had been the main driver of acute food insecurity for more than 40 million people in crisis, emergency or famine situations (IPC Phase 3 or higher) in 17 countries, compared to around 24 million people in eight countries in 2019. The socio-economic impact of COVID-19 added further hardship in some of the worst food crises. In 2021, economic shocks, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, were primary, secondary or tertiary drivers of food insecurity in 48 of the 53 countries/territories covered in the 2022 edition of the report.
The baseline situation prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was not good. The numbers of hungry, food insecure and malnourished people had been increasing for several years and we were not on track to meet the commitments of SDG 2. However, the pandemic complicated this situation to a significant extent. Between 720 million and 811 million people were hungry worldwide in 2020, 118 million to 161 million more than in 2019. In just one year, the prevalence of undernourishment rose from 8.4% to around 9.9%. In addition, almost one in three people in the world did not have access to adequate food, an increase of almost 320 million people in just one year.
The pandemic crisis affected food systems and limited people's access to food through multiple processes, including in some cases the disruption of food supply chains as a result of blockages caused by measures taken to prevent and mitigate outbreaks of COVID-19; in others, through the global economic slowdown, uneven recovery as new variants of the virus circulated and caused further threats to public health and food security, and loss of income for many people.
The pandemic has led to a global recession. World GDP fell by 3.3% in 2020 as a result of the economic slowdown caused by this global health crisis. For many people, the pandemic and the measures to tackle it resulted in unemployment, loss of income and difficulties buying food, in a context of rising prices. According to the price index maintained by the World Bank, global food prices rose by 14% in 2020, resulting in significant numbers of people going without food or reducing their food consumption.
Many people who worked informally, in services, restaurants and retail, lost their livelihoods. People working in agriculture, as seasonal workers, who, to supplement their income, need to temporarily migrate and engage in non-agricultural activities, both domestically and internationally, to support their livelihoods and raise capital to invest in their land, did too. The poorest and most vulnerable populations who have the fewest resources to cope with the loss of jobs and income, and therefore the least capacity to adapt to the crisis, are the most affected. Many of these people have had to opt for reduced rations or for lower quality and less nutritious food.
In 2022, war broke out in Ukraine, further impacting the food crisis in the wake of the pandemic. The effect of conflict situations on food crises is well known. It is estimated that more than 60% of the world's hungry people live in countries in conflict situations. Populations living in a context of conflict are more exposed to food insecurity, as the conflict can result in crop failures or prevent fields from being cultivated. It can also disrupt markets and prevent adequate food supplies from reaching the population, destroy other assets and infrastructure, impoverish people and make it difficult for them to access food economically, displace people who thus lose their livelihoods, and make access to humanitarian aid, including emergency food aid, more difficult, creating a risk of famine. In addition, people can become paralysed by fear and unable to develop alternative livelihoods.
However, the war in Ukraine has highlighted another connection between conflict and the food crisis. The significant role played by Russia and Ukraine in the international trade of certain agricultural commodities led the FAO to foresee from the outset a negative impact of the war on the food system and the global food crisis. It should be borne in mind that the two countries account for 40% of world gas exports, 30% of fertilisers, 30% of wheat exports, 50% of sunflower oil exports and 23% of world barley exports. The combined impact of the pandemic and the invasion on the food situation is therefore very dangerous for the world economy and will affect the world's most vulnerable people in particular. The FAO's chief economist, Máximo Torero, has pointed out that in 2023 we could have a problem of basic food supply at a global level, a problem of availability. This could push up prices even further and generate serious problems for the most vulnerable countries, which have already seen their food imports become significantly more expensive.
Some countries - especially less advanced countries and low-income food-deficit countries - are highly dependent on food supplies from Ukraine and Russia to meet their consumption needs. Some were already suffering from the negative effects of high international food and fertiliser prices before the conflict. As many as 47 countries are more than 30% dependent on wheat imports from Ukraine and Russia and, of these, 27 are more than 50% dependent, including Eritrea, Somalia, Armenia, Georgia, Lebanon, Egypt, Congo, Tanzania, Rwanda, Namibia, Senegal and Mauritania. Some, such as Benin, are totally dependent on wheat imports from Ukraine and Russia. Together, these 47 countries represent a population of more than 1.3 billion people.
Therefore, this conflict not only poses a risk of food insecurity for certain sectors of the Ukrainian population affected by the war, but also, because of the role of the two countries in the global food system, poses a risk of food crisis for many countries.
Although global stocks of rice, wheat and maize - the three main food staples - remain historically high, the confluence of the impacts on food systems of the pandemic, climate change, currency devaluations and higher oil prices, together with the impact of the war in Ukraine, are affecting the availability and affordability of food, given their effect on price formation.
To monitor world food prices, the FAO has been calculating the food price index since 1990. It is a complex index, composed of the prices of the 55 most basic foods, organised into five groups (cereals, oils and fats, sugar, meat and dairy products). In March 2020, with pre-pandemic data, the FAO food price index was 95.2; in March 2022, with the impact of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the index reached an all-time high: 159.7 points.
In short, our food system is not fulfilling its primary purpose, which is to feed all people sufficiently and adequately. What’s more, it is having a negative environmental impact in terms of huge greenhouse gas emissions, overexploitation of aquifers, soil degradation, loss of biodiversity, depletion of fish stocks, etc. It is also causing an enormous burden of disease (diabetes, hypertension, certain types of cancer, etc.) to the extent that an estimated 11 million deaths occur each year worldwide due to causes associated with poor nutrition. The system is faced with the enormous challenge of increasing food production for a growing humanity in a context of climate change and significantly reducing its environmental footprint. On top of all that, it is strained by the cumulative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
We have a food crisis and a food system crisis. The solutions we seek, even if they respond to short-term needs (the millions of acutely food insecure people), have to take a long-term view. The global food system needs profound reform, with radical changes as regards both the way we produce food and the way we consume it. And time is running out.