Ukraine War ‘Aggravating’ Existing Global Food Crisis: UN

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s [FAO] food price index, a tool used to measure prices of the most globally traded food staples, dipped in May for the second consecutive month after reaching a record in March, the UN agency said on Friday.

Despite the decline, the May index showed prices 22.8 percent higher compared with a year earlier, pushed higher by concerns over the Russian invasion of Ukraine – one of the world’s major bread baskets.

Luca Russo, the FAO’s lead analyst for food crises, told Al Jazeera that as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sends energy prices higher, the cost of delivering aid has increased as well. The risk of a severe food crisis is particularly felt in the developing world, he warned.

While noting that the crisis is not new, Russo explained that the number of people facing severe food insecurity has grown dramatically in the last six years.

“The Ukraine war is the latest element in an extremely complex situation. The UN had seen a lot of progress in reducing the number of people facing hunger in the last 20 years. But there’s been a reversing trend in about 20, 30 countries in the last several years.”

Fragile food systems, poor governance, conflict and climate change. In the last five, six years, the number has doubled in terms of people needing aid to survive. Events like the one in Ukraine are a source of great worry for us, the analyst added.

“We need to clarify that today there is no global food shortage. Food is available. To give you a number, each year, the world produces about 780 million metric tons of wheat, and the shortage for this year is only three million. But prices are escalating. One reason is the increased cost of energy. As a result of the Ukraine war, 19 countries in the last month put in place restrictive measures on food exports. All these contribute to increasing prices,” he also said.

Before the Ukraine crisis, we were monitoring the famine situations in Afghanistan, Yemen, South Sudan, northeastern Nigeria, and Somalia. Changes in food prices can have a devastating effect on them, the FAO analyst told Al Jazeera.

“The increased price in wheat and fuel means that with the same money we can deliver much less assistance. Also, sometimes you cannot reach people who are stuck in a conflict zone,” Luca Russo underlined.

All attention is on the war in Ukraine. I hope that slowly leaders will realize that there are problems in other parts of the world as a result of the crisis in Ukraine, the official added.