THE United Nations delivered grim news on global food security on Wednesday, reporting that 2.4 billion people didn’t have constant access to food last year, as many as 783 million faced hunger, and 148 million children suffered from stunted growth.

Five UN agencies said in the 2023 State of Food Security and Nutrition report that while global hunger numbers stalled between 2021 and 2022, many places are facing a deepening food crisis. 

They pointed to western Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, where 20 per cent of the continent’s population is experiencing hunger, more than twice the global average.

Qu Dongyu, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said: “Recovery from the global pandemic has been uneven, and the war in Ukraine has affected the nutritious food and healthy diets.

“This is the ‘new normal’ where climate change, conflict, and economic instability are pushing those on the margins even further from safety.”

According to the report, more than 3.1 billion people, 42 per cent of the global population, were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2021.

This was an increase of 134 million on 2019, the report said.

FAO chief economist Maximo Torero told reporters at a news conference launching the report that reducing the number of people eating unhealthy diets “is a big challenge, because it’s basically telling us that we have substantially to change the way we use our resources in the agricultural sector, in the agri-food system.”

He said that the latest research shows that between 691 and 783 million people were chronically undernourished in 2022, an average of 735 million, which is 122 million more people than in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic began.

Mr Torero said that UN projections for 2030 indicate that 600 million people will still be suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2030, far from the UN development goal of achieving “zero hunger” by that date.

In the report’s foreword, the heads of FAO, the World Food Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the UN children’s agency Unicef and the World Health Organisation wrote that achieving zero hunger “poses a daunting challenge.” 

The agencies called for redoubled efforts “to transform agri-food systems and leverage them” to reach the target.

The report says children are continuing to suffer from malnutrition, with not only 148 million younger than five stunted, but 45 million too thin for their height or “wasted,” while 37 million youngsters were overweight.