After a decade or so in which food insecurity had slipped into the background in Asia, the Covid-19 coronavirus crisis, the effects of climate change, inflation, biodiversity loss, and other issues have returned to center stage, with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimating that 418 million people in Asia were undernourished, accounting for almost 60 percent of the world's total. An estimated 79 million children under the age of five in the region suffer from stunted growth, while 34 million suffer from wasting.
Most of Asia’s food-insecure people are in the South Asian countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, where almost 41 percent of the population was food insecure in 2021, with 21 percent facing severe insecurity. Afghanistan, where the US’s postwar refusal to free up the country’s reserves has worsened the problem, faces perhaps the worst starvation crisis in the world today.
The world is in fact moving in the wrong direction instead of making progress towards the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, the set of 17 criteria established in 2015 to end hunger and achieve food security and improved nutrition for all by 2030, which seem increasingly not just out of reach but almost farcical. Conflicts and mass displacement continue to drive global hunger, according to UN General Secretary Antonio Gutierrez, who said recently that rising poverty, deepening inequality, rampant underdevelopment, and natural disasters are also contributing to food insecurity…
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