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	Soaring food prices have led to a steep rise in hunger by Plan International, WFP, World Vision, agencies   A Global Food Crisis. (Plan International)   We are in the midst of a devastating global food crisis. Conflict, climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and soaring food prices have led to a steep rise in hunger in countries across the world. Today, millions of children are facing the worst hunger crisis that the world has seen in decades.   Forty-five million people are close to starvation right now – facing famine or famine-like conditions – with children and women hit the hardest. Twenty-six million children under 5 are suffering from wasting, which is the most visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition.   Unless action is taken now, more lives will be lost and the devastating effects on the lives of children, especially girls, today will be felt for decades to come.   The reasons for hunger and food insecurity are many and vary from country to country, but generally, it is a result of conflict, poverty, economic shocks such as hyperinflation and rising commodity prices and environmental shocks such as flooding or drought.   The conflict in Ukraine has sent global food prices skyrocketing. A third of the world’s wheat supplies come from Ukraine or Russia. Ukraine also supplies the world with sunflower oil, barley, maize, and fertilisers. But ongoing conflict means that fields won’t be prepared, crops won’t be planted and fertilisers won’t be available.   COVID-19 also caused a sharp rise in poverty and inequality globally, as lockdowns devastated family livelihoods. In many countries, pandemic restrictions also meant disruption to food supplies, slowing remittances from family overseas and the halting of school meal programmes. Steep rises in food prices are also creating immense strain on household budgets, with the poorest families hardest hit.   According to the UN, at least 828 million people were severely food insecure already in 2020 – an increase of 148 million on the previous year.   Conflict is the biggest cause of hunger globally, and is responsible for 65% of the people facing acute food insecurity. From Mali to Syria to Mozambique, protracted fighting destroys livelihoods and forces families to flee their homes, leaving countless children, including girls, facing hunger. It also makes it extremely difficult and dangerous for humanitarian organisations to reach communities in need.   It is estimated that over 14 million people in the Central Sahel countries of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.   Climate change has contributed to food insecurity by changing weather patterns such as rainfall, increased climatic shocks such as hurricanes, cyclones, floods and droughts which all have an impact on harvests. Climate change has also increased the prevalence of crop pests such as locusts, which damage and destroy harvests.   Inflation and economic shocks has impacted the access to food for many people. Even if food is available, for many people it is too expensive to buy reducing people’s access to food. Linked to the Pandemic, many people have lost their livelihoods and income, again reducing families’ ability to purchase food.   Hunger affects girls, boys, women and men differently. When food is scarce, girls often eat less and eat last. Women and girls account for 70% of the world’s hungry. And as families and communities come under strain, girls are more likely than boys to be taken out of school, and will be at risk of child, early and forced marriage, gender-based violence, sexual exploitation and unwanted pregnancy.   Adolescent girls in Burkina Faso, Mali and South Sudan have told us that they are more likely to be married at a young age if their families are struggling financially.   Adolescents and children under the age of 5 are particularly vulnerable if they are malnourished, because of the increased rate at which they are growing and their bodies are changing. Being hungry during these critical years can stunt growth and have a significant impact on brain development, with profound consequences for a child’s educational attainment, health and future earning potential.   Hunger is also particularly dangerous for adolescent girls and women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, increasing their risk of miscarriage or dying in childbirth. For their children, it can increase the risk of stillbirth or newborn death, low birth weight and stunting, leading to an intergenerational cycle of malnutrition.   Food crises can have devastating consequences for girls’ education. Already less likely to attend school than boys, when families are hungry, girls are increasingly called upon to care for younger siblings so parents can work or seek food. All too often, they are forced to miss or drop out of school, damaging their future prospects and placing them at greater risk of gender-based violence and harmful practices such as early marriage or female genital mutilation/cutting. As a result of school closures alone, 239 million children globally are currently missing out on meals.   We can’t afford to wait until more countries reach emergency levels of food insecurity. Children are already dying from hunger. The time to act is now – there shouldn’t be any further delay.   Governments, donors and humanitarian actors must urgently contribute funding to support almost 49 million people on the brink of famine and promote the resilience of the millions of food insecure people. Failure to do so will likely result in widespread starvation as well as a complete collapse of agricultural livelihood strategies and assets.   Governments and donors must supply funding for food, nutrition, protection, education and livelihood support. This includes school feeding programmes, which should be adapted to carry on when schools are closed to reach the most vulnerable children and girls.   Food distributions and cash transfers must be scaled up to reach those in dire need. Protection mechanisms must be put in place to prevent and respond to surging protection issues, and communities must be supported to grow nutritious foods in order to prevent dietary nutrition deficits that impact children under 5 and adolescent girls the most.   http://plan-international.org/emergencies/global-food-crisis/   Sep. 2022   A generation at risk: nearly half of global food crisis hungry are children reports the World Food Programme (WFP)   WFP estimates that the global food crisis has pushed an additional 23 million under-18s into acute food insecurity since the start of the year, taking the total of children now affected to 153 million. This represents nearly half of the 345 million people facing acute hunger, according to WFP data from 82 countries.   The global food crisis is threatening the futures of millions of school-aged children who have only just returned to classrooms following the Covid-19 pandemic. Emerging evidence points to unprecedented learning losses during the pandemic, which risk being further compounded by this current food crisis.   “As every parent and teacher understands, hunger is one of the biggest barriers to effective learning – and the surge in hunger among school-age children now poses a real and present danger to a learning recovery. For children who are going hungry in their classrooms, we have a ready-made, cost-effective antidote – school meal programmes. Let’s use it", says UN Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown.   WFP and partners are calling for an ambitious plan of action to restore school meal programmes disrupted by the pandemic and to expand their reach to an additional 73 million children.   The plan would supplement wider measures to combat child hunger, including an expansion of child and maternal health programmes, support for out-of-school children, and increased investment in safety net programmes.   Hunger levels among the 250 million children now out of school are almost certainly higher than for those in school, the WFP warns.   “Millions of children are living with the consequences of the mutually reinforcing food and learning crises. Yet the link between hunger and lost opportunities for learning needs to be more prominent on the international agenda – and school meal programs can help break that link. Not investing in school meals programs is perhaps one of the worst possible economic decisions governments and donors can make, especially now,” says Carmen Burbano, Director of WFP’s School-based Programmes Division.   School meal programmes are among the largest and most effective social safety nets for school-aged children. They not only keep children, particularly girls, in school, but help improve learning outcomes by providing better and more nutritious diets.   They also support local economies, create jobs and livelihoods in communities, and ultimately help break the links between hunger and the learning crisis.   Wawira Njiru, who leads the Food for Education Foundation, an NGO which delivers school meal programmes in Kenya:   “The long-term effects of hunger and malnutrition are devastating for Kenya, and children in particular. Children do not have a vote, and they are not asked what their top priorities are. We have a moral duty to ensure that everyone is better protected from food price spikes and economic shocks. Failure to do so is quite literally handicapping the future of our country,” said Njiru.   The School Meals Coalition, made up of 70 countries, supported by more than 70 organizations has worked to scale up school meals programmes as a response to the crisis.   Fati N’zi-Hassane, from the African Union Development Agency, which is a member of the School Meal Coalition’s taskforce, said: “African countries have long recognized the benefits of school feeding to protect children's health, nutrition, and education, whilst strengthening local food systems. Country ownership and commitment is the key. Efforts to protect and scale up these programmes are now more important than ever, to protect the young people of Africa from the colliding food and education crises.”   Despite some progress, inadequate funding, a bleak global economic outlook and debt distress in low-income countries remain significant barriers to expanding school meal programmes.   WFP and education partners, are calling for: the prioritization of school health and nutrition programmes; the scale up of safety nets such as school meals as part of the food crisis response; and a robust donor response to match domestic commitments already being made by low- and lower middle-income countries.   These actions should also be monitored to help drive greater ambition and provide critical accountability. This must be done alongside core investments in maternal and child health and nutrition services to maximise impact throughout the first 8000 days of life and to set children up for a healthier and more prosperous life.   http://www.wfp.org/school-feeding   Sep. 2021   Price Shocks: Rising food prices threaten milions. (World Vision)   COVID-19 is fuelling food price rises for the world’s poorest. In May 2020, global food prices reached the highest levels in a decade. Retail food prices have risen in almost every country, but the impact of this has been greatest in poor countries where food costs account for a larger share of household budgets.   Since the pandemic was declared, between February 2020 and July 2021 food prices rose by an average of 2.9% in the U.K., 3.6% in the U.S.A., and 4.8% in Japan and Canada.   These rises were dwarfed by country-level food-price increases in Lebanon (48%), Syria (29.2%), Venezuela (29%), Uganda (21%), Yemen (18.5%), Sudan (17%), Guatemala (16.8%), Afghanistan (10.7 %), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (10.9%) and Chad (10.3%)—countries with large numbers of people who can least afford it.   While food prices are increasing, so too is unemployment, putting the cost of nutritious food further out of reach for millions of families worldwide. Pandemic-related job losses and lower incomes are forcing millions of families to skip meals, opt for cheaper and less nutritious food, or go without food altogether.   Developing countries are expected to lose more than US$220 billion in income because of COVID-19, which means there is less money to buy food at the same time that food (especially nutrient-rich food) is becoming more expensive and less available due to supply-chain disruptions.   This perfect storm of rising food prices and reduced incomes is already contributing to growing global hunger. As many as 161 million more people faced hunger in 2020 compared to the previous year—a 25% increase from 2019.   Most worryingly, more than 41 million people are currently suffering emergency levels of food insecurity and/or famine-like conditions due to a deadly mix of conflict, climate change and the economic impacts of COVID-19.   Already, Hunger is killing more people per day than Covid-19, with acute hunger estimated to kill 11 people every minute, compared to seven people per minute from the coronavirus.   Children are the most vulnerable in this ballooning hunger crisis. They have much greater needs for nutrients and become undernourished much faster than adults.   Children are also at a much higher risk of dying from diseases and undernutrition associated with hunger crises.   World Vision warns that the reduced access to nutritious food associated with COVID-19 could lead to a pandemic of child malnutrition, sharply reversing the development of a generation of children.   By 2022, the nutritional crisis from COVID-19 could result in 13.6 million more children suffering from acute malnutrition or wasting (a severe form of acute malnutrition). This is in addition to the 47 million children under age 5 who suffered from wasting in 2019 before the onset of COVID-19.   Now is the time to act. Together, private, public and NGO sectors can strengthen food-supply chains, and empower parents and caregivers with the economic tools they need to provide nutritious food for their families. A pandemic of child malnutrition cannot occur on our watch.   http://www.wvi.org/publications/report/coronavirus-health-crisis/price-shocks   Nov. 2021   Drowning just below the surface: The socioeconomic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, a report from Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies   The COVID-19 pandemic has had major economic, as well as health, impacts on every nation in the world. It has amplified existing inequalities, created new ones, and destabilized communities—reversing development gains made in recent decades.   The enormous socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 are wide-ranging and have not affected everyone equally. Throughout this pandemic, those facing the greatest vulnerabilities have been the people and groups most neglected by society—those who were already drowning just below the surface.   This report, featuring research from Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies around the world, sheds light on who has been most impacted by the pandemic and how. It also examines how Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have adapted their responses to support newly and increasingly vulnerable communities—many of whom have also been affected by large-scale disasters and other complex humanitarian crises.   http://www.ifrc.org/document/drowning-just-below-surface-socioeconomic-consequences-covid-19-pandemic http://odi.org/en/events/getting-back-on-track-to-end-extreme-poverty/ http://www.chronicpovertynetwork.org/blog/2021/5/19/covid-19-is-a-double-shock-for-many-people-living-in-poverty http://www.wiego.org/covid-19-crisis-and-informal-economy-study-0 Visit the related web page
	Ending child poverty is a policy choice by Sola Engilbertsdottir, Ruth Goulder, David Stewart UNICEF, agencies   Dec. 2021   Ending child poverty is a policy choice, by Sola Engilbertsdottir, Ruth Graham Goulder, Seda Karaca, David Stewart. (Unicef)   “My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.” This is the powerful opening line of Stephanie Land’s memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive. It’s the lived experience of many women and children across the world.   Land’s story depicts a single mother struggling to survive on meager and unreliable wages, while jumping through hoops to receive government support like childcare.   The story captures the excruciating plight of families living in poverty, even in rich countries. It’s a holding pattern that can look like: no decent pay to save money, no savings to fix the broken car, no car to get better work, no work to afford nutritious food, no food to focus on tomorrow, no focus to fight – as many in poverty are forced to – for affordable housing and a living wage. It displays, screen-sized, the unimaginable anxiety of deciding whether to spend that last $10 bill on gas, or breakfast, or phone service.   It presents the mental torture of counting every penny, buzzing with the dread of an unforeseen expense – a trip to the doctor for your daughter’s unshakable illness, brought on, it turns out, by the mould festering in your decaying home.   In the world’s wealthiest nations, like Land’s home country, one in seven children experience poverty. In the European Union, one in four children live at risk of poverty and social exclusion. For many, that suffering is invisible to those around them. Yet, as the next generation grows up, the scars of affliction stretch, morphing into trauma and anxiety.   If we zoom out, some 1 billion children worldwide are deprived of their basic rights, including health care, housing and education. A staggering one in six live in extreme poverty – meaning they survive on less than $1.90 per day.   Too often, this vicious cycle is escapable only for those whose governments prioritize it or have the financing and support to expand their efforts – by offering child benefits, school meals and education programmes for children. And cash assistance, childcare services and affordable housing for parents.   Without social protection systems, poverty will pass from one generation to the next – a phenomenon that still plagues the richest countries, and seems to be worsening in developing ones.   Despite the profound impacts social protection programmes can have, three out of four children globally remain without access to them in any form. Single mothers (and their children) are more likely to live in poverty, and poverty is also higher among indigenous, Black and Hispanic households.   More than half of all mothers with a newborn are deprived of maternity benefits, forcing them to spend their time earning wages instead of attending to the health needs – both physical and mental – of themselves and their children.   Is it possible to end this cycle? Absolutely. Child poverty is not inevitable, nor immune to efforts to address it. Ending child poverty is a policy choice, and countries that have made this choice have drastically reduced the number of children growing up impoverished.   One key policy decision is to establish and expand social protection systems and programmes, alongside the family-friendly policies critical for children, women and all parents, especially in the early years of childhood. These include child benefits, paid maternity and parental leave, childcare services, and policies that enable women to work in the formal and informal economy.   When the COVID-19 crisis hit, social protection programmes were a lifeline for families the world over: like Wasana's in Sri Lanka, who saw their savings dry up during lockdown, or Telma’s in Guatemala, who lost their source of income. Cash assistance from a government programme can make the difference between living in dignity or living in hunger.   Other critical policy choices include improving universal access to quality social services, so that no one gets left behind because they don’t know about (or have resources to navigate the complex bureaucratic processes for) public services, especially those related to early childhood development, basic and secondary schooling, health care and housing.   Promoting a decent work agenda is also key, by taking measures to deliver quality, inclusive jobs with decent wages and safe, flexible working environments.   Stephanie Land and her children no longer live in poverty, but they are an exception to the rule. For most families, the odds of escaping poverty remain slim without significant policy change.   So, what if you’re not a policymaker? You can still advocate for change that improves the circumstances of others: You can take a stance and demand child- and family-friendly policies and programmes from your lawmakers. You can voice your support for programmes that reduce child poverty – such as the Child Tax Credit in the US, which, by some projections, could cut child poverty by half.   Or, in the EU, the Child Guarantee – Europe’s flagship programme to address child poverty by breaking the intergenerational cycle of disadvantage for millions of children. No matter where you live, you can call for governments and businesses to invest in policies we know make a difference.   For example: The expansion of adequate and universal child benefits; Investment in affordable, quality childcare services, critical for ensuring support to women, parents and children; The introduction of at least 6 months of maternity and parental benefits; A holistic package of family-friendly policies to support parents today and the next generation of children.   Maid reflects the lived reality of millions of women and children today. Let’s make the choice to change that and end child poverty for good.   * Authors: Sola Engilbertsdottir and Ruth Graham Goulder are Social Policy Specialists; Seda Karaca is a Communications Specialist; and David Stewart heads the Child Poverty and Social Protection Unit at UNICEF.   http://www.unicef.org/blog/ending-child-poverty-is-policy-choice http://www.endchildhoodpoverty.org/publications-feed/2022/10/11/briefing-paper http://www.unicef-irc.org/article/2147-social-protection-for-children-not-adequate-according-to-new-world-social-protection-report.html http://poverty-unpacked.org/2021/11/14/episode-21-a-fair-chance-in-life-for-everyone-un-special-rapporteur-olivier-de-schutter/ http://www.endchildhoodpoverty.org/child-poverty-news-blogs http://www.unicef.org/social-policy/child-poverty http://www.unicef.org/reports/unicef-75-preventing-a-lost-decade http://www.savethechildren.net/news/one-five-children-fragile-states-risk-dropping-out-school-covid-takes-its-toll-save-children http://www.savethechildren.net/news/east-africa-quarter-million-children-may-have-died-starvation-year http://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/children-dying-starvation-kabul-unprecedented-food-crisis-leaves-almost-14
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