Armed conflict and the droughts caused by the El Niño effect have left 80 million people around the world in acute food crisis this year, reveals a food security report.
The report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Programme adds that a total of 240 million people are in food stress.
This corresponds to level two on a five-level international classification of food insecurity; food crisis is level three and famine is level five.
The situation is more serious than in previous years, coauthor François Kayitakire tells SciDev.Net. “Ethiopia, for example, was relatively fine in 2015,” he says. “But this year there are ten million people who are in food crisis, in the most severe drought in decades.”
At the end of 2015, food crises were caused by extreme weather events due to one of the strongest El Niño phenomena in the past 20 years, according to the report. El Niño is an irregular warming of the Pacific Ocean that changes global weather patterns.
Severe droughts hit the Horn of Africa, Southern Africa, South-East Asia, South America, Central America and the Caribbean, the report says, and are forecast to continue throughout 2016.
In addition to climate events, armed conflicts have left tens of millions of people at risk of severe hunger, the report says. “Places that need extreme attention are in the Middle East, such as Yemen and Syria,” says Kayitakire, a senior scientist at the JRC, the European Commission’s in-house science service.
According to the report, which was presented at a conference on development and food security in Belgium last month (25 April), more than seven million people in Yemen and six million in Syria are in food crisis due to escalating conflicts.
This story was published with permission from SciDev.net
