Search

One in two schoolchildren, or 388 million children worldwide, were receiving school meals when the pandemic struck, the highest number in history, according to the State of School Feeding Worldwide report.

“When you don’t have food to feed your children, when you don’t have money to buy medicines you are pushed into desperation”, said Beasley. “People don’t want to leave their homes, they are being forced to.” Hunger in Central America has quadrupled over the past two years, with 8 million people now hungry.

Nick Dyer and David Beasley said: “More than 250 million people now face extreme hunger this year alone and coronavirus has made this dire situation even worse. “There are up to 30 million adults and children facing the most acute food insecurity and who could be tipped into famine if additional support is not provided.  “The United Kingdom and World Food Programme are taking early acti

A WFP analysis shows that a 2°C rise in average global temperature from pre-industrial levels will see a staggering 189 million additional people in the grips of hunger.

“It is heart breaking to see families sleeping on the streets without a roof over them. Their houses have been reduced to dust.

Yemen, South Sudan and northern Nigeria top the list and face catastrophic levels of acute hunger, with families in pockets of South Sudan and Yemen already in the grip of - or at risk of starvation and death according to the Hunger Hotspots report.  Although the majority of the affected countries are in Africa, acute hunger is due to rise steeply in most world regions - from Afghanistan i

The United Nations World Food Programme has swiftly mounted an emergency food assistance operation deploying more than 180 staff and increasing food distributions to reach 1.4 million people, yet that is barely half of the number we should be reaching.  Other agencies are also struggling to reach many of the rest of Tigray’s hungry.   The brutal reality for our staff in Tigray is t

Broadcast quality footage for this story available via this link   “High food prices are hunger’s new best friend. We already have conflict, climate and COVID-19 working together to push more people into hunger and misery. Now food prices have joined the deadly trio,” said WFP Chief Economist Arif Husain.

It is the first passenger flight into the region since commercial flights were halted on 24 June and carried more than 30 employees from multiple humanitarian organisations working to deliver urgently needed assistance to conflict-affected communities across Tigray. “WFP and our fellow emergency responders on the ground in Mekelle are all enormously relieved to see this UNHAS flight arrive toda

Bureaucratic obstacles as well as a lack of funding also hamper the two UN agencies’ efforts to provide emergency food assistance and enable farmers to plant at scale and at the right time.   This is of grave concern as conflict, the economic repercussions of COVID-19 and the climate crisis are expected to drive higher levels of acute food insecurity in 23 hunger hotspots over the next