About 166 million people in 22 countries are suffering chronic hunger or difficulty finding enough to eat as a result of protracted food crises. Wars, natural disasters and poor government institutions are exacerbating this state of undernourishment.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said these countries are in what is termed a protracted crisis and said assistance should be refocused for countries around the world suffering from double and triple shocks. Chronic hunger and food insecurity are the most common characteristics of a protracted crisis, the FAO said in its State of Food Insecurity in the World 2010 hunger report published on Wednesday in collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP). Only last month, FAO had said that the number of hungry people in the world had declined to around 925 million from the 1.023 billion registered in 2009.
FAO and WFP said it was for the first time that anyone was offering a clear definition of a protracted crisis. This will help improve aid interventions, the two organisations said. Countries considered as being in a protracted crisis are those reporting a food crisis for eight years or more, receive more than 10 percent of foreign assistance as humanitarian relief, and be on the list of low-income food-deficit countries (LIFDCs).
Countries in protracted crisis require targeted assistance, with the focus not only on emergency relief but also on longer-term tools, such as providing school meals or implementing food-for-work programmes, the report said. Stimulating markets is also an effective long-term measure, the report said, for example through the purchase of food aid from local suppliers.
The report used three measurable criteria to determine whether or not a country is in a protracted crisis: the longevity of the crisis, the composition of external aid flows, and the inclusion of the country on FAO’s list of low-income food-deficit countries (LIFDCs). A total of 22 countries currently meet all three of these criteria.
The 22 countries are Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Haiti, Iraq, Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
The report highlighted Somalia as a classic case study for a protracted crisis. Somalia has been without a central government since 1991, and was in a state of civil war for several years prior to that. Since 2004, a Transitional Federal Government has attempted to exercise some authority but has been unable to extend its control over much of the country. The conflict led to a major famine in south–central Somalia in 1992–93. Since 2000, there have been localised food-security crises in various parts of the country. In 2009, 3.2 million people in Somalia required immediate food assistance. Most were internally displaced people; the rest were affected either by the conflict, by drought and an underlying livelihoods crisis, or both.
The proportion of people who are undernourished is almost three times as high in countries in protracted crisis as in other developing countries (if countries in protracted crisis and China and India are excluded). There are approximately 166 million undernourished people in countries in protracted crisis – roughly 20 percent of the world’s undernourished people, or more than a third of the global total if China and India are excluded from the calculation.
