WFP calls for action on World Food Day to avoid another year of record hunger

“We are facing an unprecedented global food crisis and all signs suggest we have not yet seen the worst. For the last three years hunger numbers have repeatedly hit new peaks. Let me be clear: things can and will get worse unless there is a large scale and coordinated effort to address the root causes of this crisis. We cannot have another year of record hunger,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley.

The global food crisis is a confluence of competing crises – caused by climate shocks, conflicts, and economic slowdown– that has continued to push up the number of severely food insecure people all around the world, including in Western Africa where armed conflicts in the Sahel and Lake Chad, the impact of climate change on land degradation, low economic diversification, erratic economic growth and the ripple effect of the conflict in Ukraine have driven up the number of hungry reaching a 10-year high of 43 million people between June and September 2022.

In the face of the increasing needs in a complex and unpredictable operational environment, WFP supports people and Western African governments with live-saving and live-changing solutions. Over the next months, WFP plans to provide emergency food assistance to over 11.5 million people across the Western African region. In response to the ongoing floods affecting the region, WFP is on the ground supporting national governments to help flood-hit families by providing an immediate response package, while also helping to build community resilience to future shocks.

In arid lands across the Sahel, WFP focuses on building local resilience to the cascading effects of the climate crisis, by promoting farming techniques that help restore degraded lands and ecosystems. WFP supports communities in building rainwater catchment systems and other sustainable water storage options that allow farmers to plant fruits and vegetables even after the riverbeds dry up. In just three years, WFP and communities have together rehabilitated 158,000 hectares of degraded land in the G5 Sahel countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger), helping over 2.5 million people.

Building on this year’s theme for World Food Day – “No one left behind” – WFP is calling coordinated effort across governments, financial institutions (IFIs), private sector, and partners to mitigate a potential even a more severe food crisis in 2023. This includes providing immediate support to the vulnerable, encouraging food and fertilizer production, enhance food systems, facilitate trade and the international supply of food, and investing in climate-resilient agriculture – in time and at scale.

“With conflict, COVID19, soaring food prices and multiple vulnerabilities pushing basic meals out of the reach of vulnerable families, we need to act fast to ensure nobody is left behind in the middle of the global food crisis” said Chris Nikoi, WFP’s Regional Director for Western Africa.

“We can only succeed if national governments invest in measures that help address and mitigate the impact of the emerging food crisis in the region while also strengthening the resilience of agri-food systems to increase both the availability and the access to nutritious food” Nikoi added.

While these efforts provide succour to some of the severely vulnerable, it is against a challenging global backdrop in which the number of acutely hungry people continues to increase requiring a concerted global action for peace, economic stability and continued humanitarian support to ensure food security around the world.

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The United Nations World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organization, saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.

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