hunger

Responding to the IPC report published over the weekend with alarming figures of around 7.74 million people in South Sudan likely to experience high levels of acute food insecurity between April and July 2022, Oxfam Lead in South Sudan, Juliet Moriku Balikowa said: “These latest figures just reiterate the desperate situation many people in South Sudan are facing. The number of people classified in areas of catastrophic hunger is alarming."

Over a quarter of a billion more people could crash into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 because of COVID-19, rising global inequality and the shock of food price rises supercharged by the war in Ukraine, reveals a new Oxfam brief today. 

Responding to the publication today of the IPCC’s Working Group III report on climate change mitigation, Oxfam’s Climate Policy Lead Nafkote Dabi said: “This IPCC report pulls no punches. It’s not about taking our foot off the accelerator anymore —it’s about slamming on the brakes. A warming planet is humanity’s biggest emergency."
 

The human cost of the war in Yemen is rising sharply as the conflict enters its eighth year, with the number of civilian deaths increasing sharply, hunger on the rise and three quarters of the population in urgent need of humanitarian support, Oxfam warned today. 

The global repercussions of the Ukraine crisis ―already being felt in fast-rising food, commodity and energy prices― could undermine official aid efforts to help people in other humanitarian hot-spots. 

In response to today’s Virtual High-Level Pledging Event on the Humanitarian Crisis in Yemen, Ferran Puig, Oxfam’s Country Director in Yemen said: “The world must not look away while Yemen suffers. Even before the Ukraine conflict drove up food prices and threatened food imports, two thirds of major aid programmes had already been reduced or closed because of lack of funding." 

The military coup in Burkina Faso late January made headlines. The registration that same month of over 160,000 newly displaced Burkinabé, a near-record high figure, did not. The jump marks the second biggest monthly increase since the humanitarian crisis started in the country over three years ago, warned the Norwegian Refugee Council, Action Against Hunger, Médecins du Monde France and Oxfam.

The world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion —at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day— during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty. 

Overall, 155 million people around the world are living in crisis levels of food insecurity or worse. Around two out of every three of these people are going hungry primarily because their country is in war and conflict. Women and girls are disproportionally affected. They face extraordinary dangers to secure food, and yet, too often eating last and eating least. This is their story.

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.