TE24 International Desk:
UNITED STATES – There is a “real risk” of starvation this year, UN boss Antonio Guterres said Friday, urging a meeting of clergy on food security to find effective ways to dispose of food exhibitions and reduce commodity price volatility.
Speaking at a rally in Berlin via video, Guterres said: “We are facing an unprecedented global hunger crisis. “The conflict in Ukraine has exacerbated issues that have been really mixed for a long time: environmental unrest; COVID-19 epidemic; deeply inconsistent recovery.”
More than 460,000 people in Somalia, Yemen and South Sudan are starving under the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) – a scale that helps UN agencies, provincial agencies and assemblies determine food vulnerabilities. This is a prelude to a district hunger strike.
According to the IPC, huge numbers of people in 34 different countries are near the precarious end of starvation.
“There’s a real gamble here that there will be countless hunger strikes in 2022. What’s more, 2023 could be surprisingly even worse,” Guterres called mass hunger and starvation unsatisfactory in the 21st 100 years.
Guterres said Ukraine and Russia, which produce about 29% of the world’s wheat, could not find a binding answer to a state of emergency if they figured out how to properly exchange.
Shipping from Ukrainian ports has been cut off due to an attack by neighboring Russia. Specific Western approvals are required to continue shipping grain and fertilizer to Moscow.
The United Nations and Turkey are trying to speed up the process.
Guterres did not elaborate, saying: “Universal declaration can hinder achievement.”
He similarly asked the priests at the Berlin meeting to deal with the financial crisis in non-industrialized countries.
