Hunger levels in 52 countries are “serious” or “alarming” despite progress in reducing food insecurity around the world, says the new edition of the Global Hunger Index. “The countries with the highest and worst GHI scores tend to be those engaged in or recently emerged from war,” says the report by International Food Policy Research Institute, Welthungerhilfe, and Concern Worldwide. An unheralded achievement of recent decades, says the report, is the seeming disappearance of “calamitous famines” that kill more than 1 million people. Humanitarian relief is quicker to arrive and to be distributed efficiently.
The Central African Republic, Chad, and Zambia had the highest hunger levels in the report. “In contrast, in Angola, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, hunger levels have fallen substantially since the end of the civil wars of the 1990s and 2000s,” said IFPRI. One of every nine people on earth is chronically undernourished, it said.