COVID-19 Pandemic Exacerbating Global Food Insecurity
A UN report provides updates on the global hunger crisis and details the compounding effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on this problem. Around 690 million people around the world were found to be undernourished. According to the report, the economic damage from the pandemic might push 132 million people into “chronic hunger” in 2020. Beyond caloric intake, an even more significant percentage of the global population struggles to secure nutritious and healthy meals, leading to health issues such as obesity.
Almost 690 million people were undernourished last year, the most since 2009, and the pandemic could tip as many as 132 million people into chronic hunger by the end of this year, the UN said in a report. At the same time, obesity has been on the rise as healthy foods remain out of reach for billions of people, a problem that will be compounded by the economic fallout from the virus. “The pandemic is creating a problem not of food availability, but of food access, because people will have less income because of the recession,” said Maximo Torero, chief economist of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and co-author of the report.
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