Global levels of malnutrition have not stopped growing since 2015. Now they could skyrocket.

In his undisputable portrait of world hunger, the writer Martín Caparrós asked the question: “(…) how to fight against the degradation of words? The words "millions-of-people-go-hungry" should mean something, cause something, produce certain reactions. But, in general, words no longer cause these reactions. Something would happen, perhaps, if we could make sense of the words. ”

Caparrós published his book in 2015, the lowest point in time in the global incidence of malnutrition since we began tracking. Since then, things have only gotten worse. The 2020 figures - 690 million hungry people - are ten million higher than the previous year and sixty million more than five years ago. "Sixty million" that are misplaced between "Ayuso" and "Suez", between "homeland" and "virus."

Stalin is credited with claiming that one death is a tragedy, but one million deaths is just a statistic. It is difficult to refute a genocide in this field.

Individuals should be counted, even if it takes a little longer. Counting each of the mothers I met in Kiffa (Mauritania), with her simple manner of explaining to UNICEF staff that things were going better: "my son no longer eats sand." Or peek into each of the (few) windows that are opening to the crisis in Mozambique, where a perfect storm of covid, terrorism and corporate looting is burying the north of the country in a food hole even deeper than the one they already lived in.

The statistics are worth breaking down. Speaking, one by one, of the 23 countries and the 146,700,000 people trapped in acute food insecurity within them. This category defines a state of immediate danger for those who suffer from it and indicates the need for urgent intervention, by anyone. There are 19.6 million Congolese, 16.1 million Yemenis, 12.4 million Syrians, 7.1 million Sudanese. Also the 9.3 million Venezuelans and 3.7 million Guatemalans, do not think that this is only a matter of Africans and countries at war.

It would take days to count them one after the other. Months in explaining the pain that each of the parents go through when they see their children starve. Contemplate the statistical accumulation of what FAO and the World Food Program have called hunger hotspots (see map). Their most recent report suggests that these places are on the brink of fire, amid a succession of biblical plagues: conflicts, extreme natural shocks, locusts and epidemics. Of particular concern is the situation of 34 million people in countries such as the DR Congo, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia and Nigeria. All of them, each one of them, could end up starving.

The response of the richest countries to this crisis is also biblical. While the United States, the EU or the United Kingdom have embarked on self-rescue operations whose financial magnitudes have few historical precedents, the hole of humanitarian emergencies threatens to break all records. The scrupulous financial monitoring of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is a defaulting relationship in which defaults have been growing over the last decade in parallel with humanitarian needs. The ceiling had been reached in 2020, with a global request of 38,537 million dollars and a response of 50% of that amount throughout the year. When we are less than three months into 2021, the required figure already exceeds $ 35 billion, and the donor response has been 4.5% (four-point-five-percent).

How, then, to fight against the degradation of words? How to transfer all the force of "hunger", "hypocrisy", "urgency", "forgetfulness?" How to rise a couple of feet to check the luck of having fallen on this side of the pandemic?

Original article available in Spanish: https://elpais.com/elpais/2021/03/30/3500_millones/1617114841_923652.html