In northeast Nigeria, hunger is a pot of boiling dirty water. Barely a day after returning from the region, a stronghold of the jihadist group Boko Haram, Pablo Yuste from Palencia, head of the supply chain of the World Food Program (WFP) in the African country, continues with a heavy heart.
“Hunger is very massive, there is a lot of child malnutrition; I have seen mothers put water on to heat even though they have nothing to cook so that their children think that there is going to be something for dinner; so they stop crying and fall asleep.”
Yuste, who has been with the WFP for 11 years, has been impressed by the view from the sky of a region largely controlled by fundamentalists. “You fly over fortified cities, full of displaced people, and the rest of the territory is abandoned villages, so no one can grow the crops. Conflict is not the only factor, but it indisputably contributes to hunger.”
The figures land the sensation in the Yuste field. The fight to end world hunger is being lost. After years of progress, which pushed to draw the goal of zero hunger by 2030, the number of empty stomachs in the world has skyrocketed again.
A total of 258 million people in 58 countries are acutely food insecure and need urgent help, an increase of 65 million people from a year earlier, the equivalent of the entire population of France.
The trend is discouraging. It is the fourth year of consecutive increase according to data from the Global Network against Food Crises and the highest figure that has been recorded since this study began in 2016, although part of the increase is due to the fact that the population analyzed is more espacious.
“From the global optimism that led to proposing a horizon without hunger in seven years, there has been a shock of reality in which the international community has realized that, without the absence of conflicts, it will not be possible to meet the objectives Zero Hunger”. The statistics sign below the Yuste sentence: 85% of the people who suffer the most severe hunger live in countries in conflict.
The perspective of half a lifetime dedicated to emergencies allows us to gauge the seriousness of the situation. Amelia Marzal, Head of Corporate Services for the International Federation of the Red Cross for Africa, with 25 years in the sector, describes the current global crisis as "extraordinary". “This is one of the most serious famine emergencies in decades.” During her participation in the seminar Current Food Crises in Africa, held a few weeks ago at Casa África, she pointed out up to 23 African countries seriously affected by the food crisis and assured that the current emergency is even greater than that of the mid-1980s. .
“Unlike the crises of 1984, here we have a multiplicity of global factors such as the negative consequences of the covid pandemic, the rise in food prices due to the conflict in Ukraine or the ravages of climate change, which have combined perfectly with rooted factors such as poverty, conflict, population displacement or disease; And its effect is devastating.
Although poverty, a legacy of unfair relations with the West and corrupt governments in the African case, has been at the center of many of the hunger crises for years, there are new scenarios that have darkened the horizon.
The deterioration of the situation in the Sahel, for example, is one of the most worrying points. It is also a hunger with surnames: jihadist terror
According to the Global Terrorism Index, the Sahelian region, especially Mali and Burkina Faso, has suffered an unprecedented violent spiral: last year, 43% of deaths from terrorism in the world occurred in this area, a figure higher than the sum of those registered in South Asia, the Middle East or North Africa.
The decline has occurred in just fifteen years: in fifteen years, terrorist attacks in the Sahelian desert have increased by 2,000%.
Although abrupt transfers of power have been common in recent decades in the region, in the last two years the Sahelian states have suffered up to six coups, four of them successful. The instability, heir to the fall of the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011, which meant the return to the desert of well-armed and trained mercenaries and gave free rein to the jihadists, is behind millions of empty stomachs.
For Lazare Zoungrana, secretary general of the Red Cross in Burkina Faso, the growing insecurity has generated a human tsunami. “There are already almost two million internally displaced people. It is a security crisis with humanitarian consequences because violence worsens crises that already existed in the country, such as natural disasters or health problems”.
Fundamentalist expansion, which is a growing factor in the world but especially in Africa, does not occur so much for religious or ideological reasons but for money and power.
According to experts consulted by this newspaper, both in the north of Nigeria and in the Sahel, Islamist groups control the fishing trade, the juicy smuggling of fuel, tobacco and people and a novelty that heralds dark clouds: smuggling and drug production. In areas controlled by jihadists in the Sahel or Lake Chad, where the population has fled, the cultivation of heroin poppies has spread in the last decade.
For Lucie Odile Ndione, from the WFP Regional Office for West Africa in Dakar, this fragility is compounded by the blow of climate change, with extreme and sudden weather events such as prolonged droughts and floods that destroy crops.
“Before, the stocks of the crops ran out in June and now, due to the droughts that reduce production, they run out in March. In addition, prices have risen a lot since the Covid crisis and the problem has been amplified by the war in Ukraine and inflation. As if that were not enough, there are difficulties in accessing the areas due to jihadism”.
Odile focuses on a vital problem: "we have more needs than ever and fewer donations." The perception of him is real. If in 2021, 7% of the anti-hunger programs received all the necessary funding and 57% got half of it, last year only 3% were fully funded and more than 65% stayed halfway.
The Kenyan Ahmed Garat, deputy medical coordinator for Somalia for Doctors Without Borders, sounds familiar with this feeling of forgetfulness but believes that it is not a problem of solidarity, but rather a widespread context of difficulty. “The world is helping, but there are many challenges right now.
The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have affected world economies and new catastrophes such as floods or earthquakes in Turkey and Syria have recently been added.”
Despite his understanding, he insists that the aid is not enough and from Nariobi he defines the situation in the Horn of Africa as “terrible”, which adds to the jihadist violence the ravages of the worst drought in decades. “In the last three or four years it has not rained and the harvests have been poor and many animals have died. People don't have food in their homes."
The Somali alarm is the worst in decades. Somalia alone accumulates 57% of the population in catastrophic levels of hunger. The other countries in this extreme situation are Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Haiti (for the first time in the country's history), Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen.
Inaction will have consequences in the future because it attacks the development of thousands of children. This week, Mohamed Fall, Unicef's Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa, warned of the "devastating" effects for the smallest of a childhood without adequate nutrition. "The crisis has deprived children of the essentials of their childhood, such as enough food, a home, clean water or even going to school."
