Search results

Ahead of the G20 Summit in Rome, Italy, Oxfam calls on G20 leaders to take urgent action to dramatically scale up manufacturing and access to COVID-19 vaccines around the world, promote a fair economic recovery, fight hunger, lower dangerous greenhouse gas emissions, and help the poorest countries adapt to the climate change already happening.

Over 50 million people are in need of immediate food assistance in the Horn East and Central Africa, with numbers expected to rise significantly as the region braces for harsh, climate fuelled La Niña conditions, said Oxfam today. The warning comes as world leaders prepare to meet for a virtual Climate Ambition Summit.   

A year and a half since the Covid-19 pandemic began, deaths from hunger are outpacing the virus. The worst is still yet to come unless governments urgently tackle food insecurity and its root causes head on. We need action to create fairer, more resilient and sustainable ways of feeding the world.

Ten of the world’s worst climate hotspots – those with the highest number of UN appeals driven by extreme weather events – have suffered a 123% rise in acute hunger over just the past six years, according to an Oxfam report published today.

In reaction to today’s "Global Report on Food Crises” which says that more than 193 million people across 53 countries are experiencing acute hunger and require urgent food, nutrition and livelihoods assistance, Oxfam Global Food Security and Livelihoods expert, Emily Farr, said: “It is deeply concerning to find extreme hunger increasing to a magnitude never seen before. 40 million more people have been pushed to extreme hunger, nearly a 25% surge since last year, and 80% since 2016."

One in five people (282m) is now under-nourished and 93 million in 36 African countries are suffering extreme levels of hunger. Women and children are hit hardest. In Sub-Saharan Africa, one in three children under five is stunted by chronic undernutrition while two out of five women of childbearing age is anemic because of poor diets.

Six months after the conflict erupted in Tigray, thousands of farmers have nothing to plant ahead of the rainy season as the crisis compounded by climate-fueled locust devastated their tools and livestock and pushed over 5 million people to extreme levels of hunger, warned Oxfam today.

G7 leaders meeting in Taormina, Sicily, this week should take the lead in fighting famine and immediately fund nearly half of the UN’s urgent appeal to avoid catastrophic hunger and more deaths.

Plus, three other critical questions ahead of Friday’s G20 summit.

In reaction to the United Nations Food Systems Summit, which was held over the past two days, Thierry Kesteloot, Oxfam’s food policy advisor said:“The Food Systems Summit has failed hundreds of millions who are going hungry every day, by offering elitist and mere band-aid solutions rather than tackling the root causes of our broken global food system.