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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