Instead of debt we need intellect!
Than 10 million people in the Asia Pacific region became acutely food-insecure since 2022 mainly due to the protracted conflict in Ukraine and the Climate induced Global Food Crisis. This meant an increase of 41.5 million people since pre-pandemic levels and a total of 69.1 million acutely food-insecure people in the region at the start of 2023.
Of the 465 million people undernourished in Asia in 2021 (55 percent of the total world undernourished), the latest the State of Food Insecurity report (SOFI) predicts an increase between 2.3 percent in 2023 due to the global temperature rise.
1.9 billion people in the region were unable to afford healthy diets in 2020; Asia accounts for the highest increase in the absolute number of people for whom a healthy diet is out of reach (78 million) and the largest increase in the cost of a healthy diet (4 percent). The cost of a healthy diet has undoubtedly continued to rise as food prices have surged in 2022 and 2023.
In the 2020 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World Report, the Philippines recorded the most number of food insecure people in Southeast Asia in 2017 to 2019, with 59 million Filipinos suffering from moderate to severe lack of consistent access to food.
The food crisis will exacerbate malnutrition, especially for women and children. This is especially concerning as the region already has the highest burden of all forms of malnutrition in the world, including childhood wasting, stunting and micronutrient deficiencies, with respectively 65 percent of global wasted children, 47 percent of stunted children, 51 percent of anemic women of reproductive age, and 55 percent of low childbirth cases in Southeast and South Asia. The number of malnourished people may also rise due to a reduction in access to essential health and nutrition services that prevent and treat acute malnutrition.
The food crisis will have a disproportionate impact on households with limited purchasing power, including those with low incomes, working in the informal sector, as well as female-headed households, larger households, and households with persons with disabilities.
Key drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition include higher food, fertilizer, and fuel prices along with transport and supply chain disruptions, devalued regional currencies, and limited resources to respond to increasing social and economic demands, Water scarcity and low crop yields will result in adding to the continuing hunger crisis in the region, climate experts said. Yet these experts spend hundreds of thousands of dollars telling people how quickly they will die rather than implementing low cost and available answers to the problems. Simply put if regions embrace solar and wind power and incorporate simple water harvesting machines that collect air moisture even from arid lands to water crops and supply water to homes regions could become self sufficient and prosperous. Simple fog nets that can be made from materials found anywhere in the world could be utilized for agrarian areas and even private homes!
(Fog net Link place in browser- https://youtu.be/zDa1x2UQMH8)
Several governments face increased debt, reduced foreign exchange reserves, and an uncertain growth outlook. This will limit their institutional ability to sustainably mitigate and respond to the impact on vulnerable households. As a result, there could be rising risks of civil unrest and riots over food and other resources, as were seen during the 2008-09 crisis without positive and forward thinking innovation. Extreme weather is a driver of world hunger. As global temperatures and sea levels rise, the result is more heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones and wildfires. Those conditions make it difficult for farmers to grow food and for the hungry to get it. The key is not to fight nature but use it to get the results you want by understanding simple processes.
The food crisis will require a collective and coordinated approach between governments, international financial institutions, UN agencies, non-governmental organizations, civil society, and the private sector. This coordinated approach is essential to ensure domestic resources and external funding can efficiently scale up targeted, nutrition-sensitive intelligent social protections not promises and monies thrown away or confiscated by greedy officials.to fund aggression. . Efforts should balance immediate/short-term needs with intelligent self sustaining investments instead of long-term investments that leave communities in debt.
The world faces a global hunger crisis of unprecedented proportions. In just two years, the number of people facing, or at risk of, acute food insecurity increased from 135 million in 53 countries pre-pandemic, to 345 million in 79 countries in 2023.
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