In northeastern Nigeria, hunger is a boiling pot of dirty water. Barely a day after returning from the region, stronghold of the jihadist group Boko Haram, Pablo Yuste, head of the supply chain of the World Food Program (WFP) in the African country, continues with a shrinking heart. “Hunger is very massive, there is a lot of child malnutrition. I have seen mothers put water to heat even if they have nothing to cook so that their children think there will be something for dinner; so they stop crying and fall asleep”.
Yuste, who has been fighting hunger for the WFP for 11 years, was impressed by the view from the sky of a region largely controlled by fundamentalists. “Remaining fortified cities, full of displaced people, and the rest of the territory is abandoned villages, so no one can cultivate the harvest. The conflict is not the only factor, but it contributes to increasing hunger in an indisputable way”.
The figures land the sensation on the land of Yuste. The fight to eliminate world hunger is being lost. After years of progress, which pushed to draw the goal of zero hunger by 2030, the number of empty stomachs in the world has skyrocketed again. A total of 258 million people in 58 countries are acutely food insecure and in need of urgent assistance; a growth of 65 million people compared to a year ago, the equivalent of the entire population of France.
The trend is discouraging. It is the fourth consecutive year of increase, according to data from the Global Network against Food Crises, and the highest figure that has been recorded since this study began in 2016, although part of the increase is due to to the fact that the population analyzed is larger.
“From the global optimism that led to raising a horizon without hunger, in seven years it has gone to a shock of reality in which the international community has realized that without the absence of conflicts the hunger goals cannot be met zero”. The statistics bear out Yuste’s sentence: 85% of the people who suffer the most severe hunger live in countries in conflict.
The perspective of half a life dedicated to emergencies makes it possible to calibrate the gravity of the situation. Amelia Marzal, head of corporate services at the International Federation of the Red Cross for Africa, with 25 years in the sector, describes the current global crisis as “extraordinary”. “This is one of the most serious hunger emergencies in recent decades.” During his participation in the seminar Current food crises in Africa, held a few weeks ago at Casa Africa, he pointed out up to 23 African countries seriously affected by the food crisis and assured that the current emergency exceeds even those of mid eighties “Unlike the crises of 1984, here we have a multiplicity of global factors, such as the negative consequences of the covid pandemic, the rise in food prices due to the war in Ukraine or the ravages of climate change, which have perfectly combined with entrenched factors such as poverty, conflict, population displacement or disease, and the effect of this is devastatingâ€.
Although poverty, a legacy of unfair relations with the West and corrupt governments, in the African case, has been at the center of many hunger crises for years, there are new scenarios that have darkened the horizon.
The deterioration of the situation in the Sahel, for example, is one of the most worrying points. It is, moreover, a hunger with surnames: jihadist terror. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the Sahelian region, especially Mali and Burkina Faso, has suffered an unprecedented violent spiral: last year 43% of the world’s terrorist deaths took place in this area, a figure higher than to the sum of those recorded in South Asia, the Middle East or North Africa. The decline has happened in just fifteen years: in three years attacks in the Sahelian desert have increased by 2,000%.
Although abrupt transfers of power have been common over the past decades in the region, in the last two years the Sahelian states have received up to six coups d’état, four of which were successful. Instability, heir to the fall of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011, which meant the return to the desert of well-armed and trained mercenaries and gave free rein to jihadists, is behind millions of empty stomachs. For Lazare Zoungrana, secretary general of the Red Cross in Burkina Faso, the growing insecurity has brought new damage. “There are already almost two million internally displaced people. It is a security crisis with humanitarian consequences, because the violence worsens the crisis that already existed in the country with natural disasters or health problems”.
The fundamentalist expansion, which is a growing factor in the world but especially in Africa, does not take place for religious or ideological reasons, but for money and power. According to experts consulted by this newspaper, both in northern Nigeria and in the Sahel, the Islamists control the fishing trade; the juicy smuggling of fuel, tobacco and people, and a new thing that heralds clouds: the smuggling and production of drugs. In areas controlled by jihadists in the desert or Lake Chad, where the population has fled, the cultivation of heroin poppies has spread in the last decade.
For Lucie Odile Ndione of the WFP regional office for West Africa in Dakar, this fragility is compounded by the blow of climate change, with extreme and sudden weather phenomena such as prolonged droughts and floods that destroy crops. “Previously, harvest stocks ended in June, and now, due to droughts, which reduce production, they end in March. In addition, prices have gone up a lot since the covid crisis and the problem has been amplified by the war in Ukraine and inflation. To make matters worse, there are difficulties in accessing the areas due to jihadism”. Odile focuses on another vital problem: “We have more needs than ever and fewer donations than ever.” His perception is real. If in 2021 7% of anti-hunger programs received all the necessary funding and 57% got half of it, last year only 3% were fully funded and more than half way 65%
The Kenyan Ahmed Garat, medical coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières Somalia, feels familiar with this feeling of being forgotten, but he believes that it is not a problem of solidarity, but of an extended context of difficulty. “The world is helping, but there are currently many challenges. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have affected world economies and new catastrophes have added to the problem, such as floods or earthquakes in Turkey and Syria”. Despite his understanding, he insists that the aid is not enough and from Nairobi defines as “terrible” the situation in the Horn of Africa, which adds to the jihadist violence the ravages of the worst drought in decades. “It hasn’t rained in the last three or four years, the harvest has been poor and many animals have died. People don’t have food at home.”
The Somali alarm is the worst in decades. Somalia alone accumulates 57% of the population in catastrophic levels of hunger. The rest of the countries in this extreme situation are Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Haiti (for the first time in the country’s history), Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen.
Inaction will have consequences in the future, because it attacks the development of thousands of children. This week, Mohamed Fall, UNICEF regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa, warned of the “devastating” effects of a childhood without adequate nutrition for the smallest. “The crisis has deprived children of the essential things of their childhood, such as food, a home, drinking water or even going to school.”
