Food insecurity and malnutrition have become “new normal”says the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Qu Dongyu, as reported by the online publication Agriland on April 24.
The FAO Director-General said the World Food Crises Report, released on April 24, should serve as a wake-up call to ensure that emergency agricultural assistance is not neglected. The report indicates that food crises are increasingly prolonged.
Qu Dongyu highlighted the risk of “hard-won development gains being reversed.” The report found that in 2023, 282 million people in 59 countries and territories needed urgent action to close the food consumption gap.
36 million people are in the phase defined as “an emergency situation requiring urgent measures to save lives and livelihoods”. The FAO said it was alarming that 36 countries had been included in the reports over the past eight years. This highlights the difficulty of restoring food security when food insecurity becomes acute.
Qu Dongyu asked to go beyond the necessary direct distributions and find “more sustainable solutions”. According to FAO, providing seeds, tools and livestock, as well as the means to restart food production on a larger scale, is often the most cost-effective way to feed the greatest number of people in hard-to-reach areas. The FAO said that often only a small portion of humanitarian assistance in crisis situations is allocated to protecting agricultural livelihoods.
Source: Rossa Primavera
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