The number of people suffering from hunger worldwide continues to rise, made worse by war and climate change, despite efforts to eradicate it entirely by 2030, UN organizations warned on Tuesday.
A total of 821 million people – or one in nine – went hungry in 2017, a UN report, jointly unveiled by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Food Program (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), and International Fund for Agricultural Development, found.
This was up from 804 million in 2016, and represented the third year in a row that global hunger levels have increased, following a decade of declines.
Referring to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by member nations in 2015, the report warned that "without increased efforts, there is a risk of falling far short of achieving the SDG target of hunger eradication by 2030."
Asia was the region with the highest number of undernourished people, with about 515 million people.
But hunger appeared to be increasing in almost all of Africa and in South America, the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018 report found.
At the other end of the spectrum, global adult obesity was also worsening, with 672 million adults – more than one in eight – are now obese, up from 600 million in 2014.
The report pointed to climate change, as well as conflict, as key drivers behind the rise in global hunger.
The report's editor Cindy Holleman said increasing variation in temperature, intense, erratic rainfall and changing seasons were all affecting the availability and quality of food.
"That's why we are saying we need to act now," Holleman, senior FAO economist for food security and nutrition, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Because we're concerned it's not going to get better, that it's only going to get worse."
Changes in climate were already undermining the production of major crops, and "without building climate resilience, this is expected to worsen, as temperatures increase and become more extreme," the report warned.
