Severe food crises threaten hundreds of thousands of people in vulnerable areas, including the Palestinian territories, Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti, and Mali, where populations face or near famine, says a report by the United Nations’ food agencies released on Thursday.

Conflicts, economic instability, and climate shocks — combined with reduced funding for emergency food and agriculture assistance — are driving alarming levels of acute food insecurity, the report warned.

“Immediate, scaled-up intervention is needed to prevent further deterioration in these already vulnerable regions,” it added.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme said acute food insecurity is projected to worsen across 16 “hunger hotspots” during the next six months in 14 countries and two regions.

Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti, Mali and the Palestinian territories remain at the “highest concern level,” the report said.

Chad, Lebanon, Myanmar, Mozambique, Nigeria, the Syrian Arab Republic and Yemen are classified as “hotspots of very high concern,” where large numbers of people are facing or are projected to face critical levels of acute food insecurity.

“Conflict and armed violence continue to be the primary drivers of hunger in numerous hotspots, disrupting food systems, displacing populations, and obstructing humanitarian access,” the report warned.

FAO and WFP experts believe that the conflict in Sudan is likely to expand, “driving mass displacement, resulting in famine levels likely to persist and the number of people in catastrophic conditions to increase.”

That will further aggravate the regional humanitarian crisis, resulting in increased cross-border movements to neighbouring countries, primarily Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic.

The UN agencies also stressed that the ongoing conflict in the Palestinian territories has driven “unprecedented needs, with near-total displacement of the population and an increased risk of regional spillover”.

In Lebanon, the ongoing escalation of conflict is significantly increasing the number of people requiring humanitarian assistance and is severely impacting levels of acute food insecurity, they added.

Since the last report in May 2024, Kenya, Lesotho, Namibia and the Niger have been added to the hunger hotspots list, partly due to the impact of climate extremes.

Beyond conflict, weather extremes and increased climate variability are exacerbating acute food insecurity in many regions, the report said.

La Niña — a natural climate pattern that influences global weather marked by cooler ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific – is expected to persist through March 2025, with a significant impact on rainfall patterns and temperatures.

“While La Niña may enhance agricultural prospects in some areas, it also increases the risk of flooding in parts of Nigeria, Malawi, Mozambique, South Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe,” the report said.

The UN agencies warned that without “immediate humanitarian efforts and concerted international action” to address severe constraints and advocate for the de-escalation of conflicts, further starvation and loss of life are likely in Palestine, the Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti and Mali.

“Addressing and preventing famine in these regions will require greater investment in integrated solutions that cut across traditional mandates, targeting the root causes of food insecurity and reducing dependency on emergency aid,” they said.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Paris:

Halving food waste could cut climate-warming emissions and end undernourishment for 153 million people globally, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the UN’s food agency said in a joint report Tuesday. 

Around a third of food produced for human consumption gets lost or wasted globally, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization — resulting in useless emissions and less available food for those who need it. 

By 2033, the number of calories lost and wasted between produce leaving farms and reaching shops and households could be more than twice the number of calories currently consumed in low-income countries in a year, the report warned. 

Cutting in two the amount of food lost and wasted along the journey from farm to fork “has the potential to reduce global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by four per cent and the number of undernourished people by 153 million by the year 2030,” according to the report.

“This target is a highly ambitious upper bound and would require substantial changes by both consumers and producer side,” they added. 

Agriculture, forestry and other land use account for around one-fifth of global human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. 

UN nations have committed to cutting per capita food waste by 50 percent by 2030 as part of sustainable development goals but there is no global target for reducing food loss along the production supply chain.

Between 2021 and 2023, fruit and vegetables accounted for more than half of the lost and wasted food given their extremely perishable nature and relatively short shelf life, according to the report. 

Cereals followed, accounting for over a quarter of lost and wasted food.  

The FAO estimates that approximately 600 million people will be facing hunger in 2030.

“Measures to reduce food loss and waste could significantly increase food intake worldwide as more food becomes available and prices fall, ensuring greater access to food for low-income populations,” the report said. 

Halving food loss and waste by 2030 could result in increased food intake by 10 per cent for low-income countries, six per cent in lower middle-income nations and four per cent in upper middle-income ones, it added. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm. Floods, heat waves and other weather extremes are making agriculture increasingly precarious, especially in the Global South.

The war in Ukraine is also a factor. Russia is blockading Ukrainian grain exports, and fertilizer prices have surged because of trade sanctions on Russia, the world’s leading fertilizer exporter.

Amid these challenges, some organizations are renewing calls for a second Green Revolution, echoing the introduction in the 1960s and 1970s of supposedly high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice into developing countries, along with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Those efforts centered on India and other Asian countries; today, advocates focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where the original Green Revolution regime never took hold.

But anyone concerned with food production should be careful what they wish for. In recent years, a wave of new analysis has spurred a critical rethinking of what Green Revolution-style farming really means for food supplies and self-sufficiency.

Also Read | M.S. Swaminathan: A timeline of the Father of the Green revolution

As I explain in my book, The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World, the Green Revolution does hold lessons for food production today – but not the ones that are commonly heard. Events in India show why.

A triumphal narrative

There was a consensus in the 1960s among development officials and the public that an overpopulated Earth was heading toward catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, famously predicted that nothing could stop “hundreds of millions” from starving in the 1970s.

India was the global poster child for this looming Malthusian disaster: Its population was booming, drought was ravaging its countryside and its imports of American wheat were climbing to levels that alarmed government officials in India and the U.S.

Then, in 1967, India began distributing new wheat varieties bred by Rockefeller Foundation plant biologist Norman Borlaug, along with high doses of chemical fertilizer. After famine failed to materialize, observers credited the new farming strategy with enabling India to feed itself.

Explained |Key scientific terms associated with Dr. M.S. Swaminathan’s research and Green Revolution

Borlaug received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and is still widely credited with “saving a billion lives.” Indian agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan, who worked with Borlaug to promote the Green Revolution, received the inaugural World Food Prize in 1987. Tributes to Swaminathan, who died on Sept. 28, 2023, at age 98, have reiterated the claim that his efforts brought India “self-sufficiency in food production” and independence from Western powers.

Debunking the legend

The standard legend of India’s Green Revolution centers on two propositions. First, India faced a food crisis, with farms mired in tradition and unable to feed an exploding population; and second, Borlaug’s wheat seeds led to record harvests from 1968 on, replacing import dependence with food self-sufficiency.

Recent research shows that both claims are false.

India was importing wheat in the 1960s because of policy decisions, not overpopulation. After the nation achieved independence in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru prioritized developing heavy industry. U.S. advisers encouraged this strategy and offered to provide India with surplus grain, which India accepted as cheap food for urban workers.

Meanwhile, the government urged Indian farmers to grow nonfood export crops to earn foreign currency. They switched millions of acres from rice to jute production, and by the mid-1960s India was exporting agricultural products.

Also Read | ‘The dark side of the green revolution addressed’

Borlaug’s miracle seeds were not inherently more productive than many Indian wheat varieties. Rather, they just responded more effectively to high doses of chemical fertilizer. But while India had abundant manure from its cows, it produced almost no chemical fertilizer. It had to start spending heavily to import and subsidize fertilizer.

India did see a wheat boom after 1967, but there is evidence that this expensive new input-intensive approach was not the main cause. Rather, the Indian government established a new policy of paying higher prices for wheat. Unsurprisingly, Indian farmers planted more wheat and less of other crops.

Once India’s 1965-67 drought ended and the Green Revolution began, wheat production sped up, while production trends in other crops like rice, maize and pulses slowed down. Net food grain production, which was much more crucial than wheat production alone, actually resumed at the same growth rate as before.

But grain production became more erratic, forcing India to resume importing food by the mid-1970s. India also became dramatically more dependent on chemical fertilizer.

According to data from Indian economic and agricultural organizations, on the eve of the Green Revolution in 1965, Indian farmers needed 17 pounds (8 kilograms) of fertilizer to grow an average ton of food. By 1980, it took 96 pounds (44 kilograms). So, India replaced imports of wheat, which were virtually free food aid, with imports of fossil fuel-based fertilizer, paid for with precious international currency.

Today, India remains the world’s second-highest fertilizer importer, spending US$17.3 billion in 2022. Perversely, Green Revolution boosters call this extreme and expensive dependence “self-sufficiency.”

The toll of ‘green’ pollution

Recent research shows that the environmental costs of the Green Revolution are as severe as its economic impacts. One reason is that fertilizer use is astonishingly wasteful. Globally, only 17% of what is applied is taken up by plants and ultimately consumed as food. Most of the rest washes into waterways, where it creates algae blooms and dead zones that smother aquatic life. Producing and using fertilizer also generates copious greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

In Punjab, India’s top Green Revolution state, heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides has contaminated water, soil and food and endangered human health.

In my view, African countries where the Green Revolution has not made inroads should consider themselves lucky. Ethiopia offers a cautionary case. In recent years, the Ethiopian government has forced farmers to plant increasing amounts of fertilizer-intensive wheat, claiming this will achieve “self-sufficiency” and even allow it to export wheat worth $105 million this year. Some African officials hail this strategy as an example for the continent.

But Ethiopia has no fertilizer factories, so it has to import it – at a cost of $1 billion just in the past year. Even so, many farmers face severe fertilizer shortages.

The Green Revolution still has many boosters today, especially among biotech companies that are eager to draw parallels between genetically engineered crops and Borlaug’s seeds. I agree that it offers important lessons about how to move forward with food production, but actual data tells a distinctly different story from the standard narrative. In my view, there are many ways to pursue less input-intensive agriculture that will be more sustainable in a world with an increasingly erratic climate.