Rome – The Global Report on Food Crises should serve as a wake-up call, and ensure that we don’t neglect the provision of agricultural aid in emergency situations, QU Dongyu, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) said during the presentation of the joint report today.
The report shows that food crises are becoming increasingly protracted and underscored the risk that “hard-won development gains are being reversed” as food insecurity and malnutrition become a “new normal” in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Qu said.
The report found that 282 million people in 59 countries and territories in 2023 needed urgent action to reduce food consumption gap, and 36 million people are in in IPC Phase 4, defined as Emergency, for which urgent action is required to save lives and livelihoods. Alarmingly, 36 countries have featured in this report for the past eight years, highlighting the difficulty of restoring food insecurity once its absence becomes acute.
FAO’s Director-General focused on that as showcasing how agricultural assistance, often deemed a slower-acting approach, should be scaled up in crisis situations.
Qu urged going beyond necessary direct distributions to find more sustainable solutions, in order to go beyond meeting humanitarian needs and reduce them. Providing seeds, tools and livestock and the means to restart food production at scale is often the most cost-effective way to assure that food reaches the greatest number of people in hard-to-reach areas.
Examples of that shift in perspective can be found in the Sudan, where FAO provided crop seeds to one million farming families, enabling a cereals harvest that met the needs of at least 13 million people, and in Afghanistan, where a notable increase in funding for emergency agricultural interventions has contributed to an 11 percent decrease in rural food insecurity in that country since 2022,.