For the past three years, the number of people faced with acute food insecurity – characterized by the impossibility of regularly accessing sufficient nourishing foods – has almost tripled, going from 135 million before the Pandemic of Cavid -19 to Plus 350 million today . Six countries around the world are in a famine.
One of the factors of this terrifying development of hunger in the world lies in the price of foodstuffs, which is today about 30 % to that before the pandemic. Coming further worsening the situation, climate change and war in Ukraine came to exhaust the resources of countries and households, increasing poverty and vulnerability in the world at a rate never seen in the twentieth .
The currencies of the depreciated southern countries 2>
Two factors aggravate this crisis in developing countries: the depreciation of currencies, the growing cost of fertilizers and their scarcity.
The first factor mainly affects networking countries of foodstuffs. Their governments are financed in national currency, but buy food products on international markets with foreign currencies – mainly in US dollars. The dollar having appreciated in the wake of the interest rate increases, the currencies of the countries of the South have depreciated, forcing their governments to pay more from their national currency to import the same quantities of food.
In 2022, at least 88 countries experienced a depreciation of their currency compared to the dollar; In 31 of them, this depreciation exceeded 10 %. Ethiopia , for example, – one of the six countries prey to famine – pays its wheat today about 180 % more than 2020 – and almost half of This increase is due solely to the depreciation of its currency compared to the dollar.
This is what we, members of Response group to world crises of the United Nations (UN), let’s call the double burden: Even if the food prices have recently been falling on international markets, they can still increase in national markets, due to the increase in interest rates and the depreciation of currencies in the countries of the South. In addition, the current crisis in food accessibility could worsen in the near future, given the dynamics on the fertilizer market.
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