More than 113 million people across 53 countries experienced
"acute hunger" last year because of wars and climate disasters, with
Africa the worst-hit region, the UN said Tuesday.
Yemen,
the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan and Syria were among the
eight nations accounting for two-thirds of the total number of people
worldwide exposed to the risk of famine, the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) said in its 2019 global report on food crises.
Launched three years ago, the annual study takes stock of the countries facing the greatest difficulties.
African
states were "disproportionally" affected as close to 72 million people
on the continent suffered acute hunger, the FAO's emergencies director
Dominique Bourgeon told AFP on Tuesday.
Conflict and
insecurity remained key factors, along with economic turbulence and
climate-related shocks like drought and floods, the report found.
In
countries on the verge of famine, "up to 80 percent of the population
depend on agriculture. They need both emergency humanitarian aid for
food and measures to help boost agriculture," Bourgeon said.
The report highlighted the strain put on countries hosting large
numbers of refugees, including neighbouring nations of war-torn Syria
as well as Bangladesh, which has received more than a million Rohingya
Muslims from Myanmar.
The FAO said it also expected the
number of displaced people to increase "if the political and economic
crisis persists in Venezuela" which is likely to declare a food
emergency this year.
Bourgeon said he was concerned by
the "important and significative rise" in poverty in Venezuela, as it
grapples with dire economic and living conditions worsened by an ongoing
political crisis.
Globally, the study noted that the
overall situation slightly improved in 2018 compared to 2017 when 124
million people suffered acute hunger.
The drop can
partially be attributed to the fact that some countries in Latin America
and the Asia Pacific region for instance were less affected by weather
disasters that had struck in previous years.
However,
the FAO warned that the year-on-year trend of more than 100 million
people facing famine was unlikely to change in the face of continued
crises.
Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria all suffered bad droughts in 2018, which severely impacted agricultural output.
The
FAO also stressed that "high levels of acute and chronic malnutrition
in children living in emergency conditions remained of grave concern".
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