In 2021, 2.3 million people faced moderate or severe insecurity in this area, said Oleg Kobyakov, director of the Moscow branch of the UN Food OrganizationMOSCOW, October 21.
/tass/. The global food crisis acquired threatening proportions long before the events in Ukraine. This opinion was expressed by Oleg Kobyakov, director of the Moscow branch of the UN Food Organization (FAO), in an interview with Izvestia published on Friday.
"The food crisis broke out, or rather, acquired threatening proportions long before the events in Ukraine," Kobyakov said. He recalled that FAO Deputy Director General Maurizio Martina explained that even before the conflict in Ukraine, almost 200 million people in 53 countries suffered from acute food shortages.
According to Kobyakov, in addition to the increase in the number of chronically hungry, 2.3 million people faced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2021, which is more than a quarter of the world's population.
"Today, healthy food diets are economically inaccessible to 3.1 billion people. Thus, we have to state with regret that the world community will hardly be able to achieve the second goal of sustainable development - to eliminate hunger by 2030," Kobyakov said.
Kobyakov stressed that "armed conflicts, economic upheavals and the negative consequences of climate change <...> inhibit the sustainable development of agri-food sectors of the economy." "It is necessary not only to eliminate hunger, but also to carry out a radical restructuring of agro-food systems to increase their efficiency many times so that we can feed 9 billion people who will live on the planet by the middle of the XXI century," the director of the UN Food Organization said.
