World Hunger Is On The Rise, Still Affects 821 Million People: UN
A recent United Nations (UN) report highlighted that an estimated 820 million people did not have enough to eat in 2018. It also brought out that shockingly the number has risen from the previous year which stood at 811 million.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the increase in the number of people living without appropriate meals presents the immense challenge of achieving the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger by 2030 as highlighted in the new edition of the annual The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report released on Monday.
The number suggests that one in nine people faces hunger issues. Further, in Asia, the number of people facing the issue in Asia was the highest at 513.9 million followed by Africa with 256.1million hungry people.
Further, the report also came up with another disgraceful fact that there’s a continuous rise in overweight and obesity, especially among school-going children and adults. Taking count of the obese people around the world, the report brought out that around 672 million are facing obesity across the world.
“Our actions to tackle these troubling trends will have to be bolder, not only in scale but also in terms of multisectoral collaboration,” the heads of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) urged in their joint foreword to the report.
It also highlighted that women are more prone to food insecurity than men in every continent and reported the largest gap among the genders in Latin America.
Reporting the figures on babies born with low weight, the report stated that 20.5 million or one in seven babies faced this problem. In addition to the challenges of stunting and wasting, Asia and Africa are also home to nearly three-quarters of all overweight children worldwide, largely driven by consumption of unhealthy diets.
The report is part of tracking progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 2 Zero Hunger, which aims to end hunger, promote food security and end all forms of malnutrition by 2030.
