Experts believe that there is something much deadlier than the coronavirus pandemic that would kill more people in the coming year; hunger. The global crisis has severely affected farmers and their crops, bringing an unprecedented level of food shortage in both cities and countrysides.
A worse issue than COVID-19
United Nations analysts will be holding an online conference starting Tuesday to address the problem and figure out a solution to the apparent worsening of hunger and avoid catastrophic damage to the Asia-Pacific region that is caused by the lack of jobs in a drowning economy.
According to AP News, The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) expects that the number of people who have less access to food will go up by up to 132 million this year and that the number of children who are acutely malnourished will increase by 6.7 billion across the world due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
In a commentary ahead of the virtual meeting, the director-general of the FAO, Qu Dongyu, said that the world is currently facing two kinds of pandemics; the first is the COVID-19 virus and its deadly effects on humans, which also hampers people's livelihood and economies around the world, and the second is hunger, which has ravaged international communities.
The range of effects of the pandemic on restrictions of businesses and travel have hampered the efforts of farmers and the growth of their crops. Migrant workers are unable to harvest their yield and workers are blocked from reaching their job locations. Several families who live on farms have been forced to sell their livestock and farming equipment to buy necessities.
The multitude of effects of the coronavirus pandemic, several natural disasters and weather phenomena, and pests have highlighted the lack of response plans to manage multiple risks that threaten the world's food systems, as reported by ABC News.
Determining possible solutions
Authorities of the FAO are urging officials to hasten the distribution of highly-advanced technological equipment including drones and smartphone apps that are capable of monitoring the status of crops and harvests in an attempt to move forward with the evolution of food systems in becoming more manageable even in times of crisis.
UN officials say that the effort should include food insecure places such as Yemen where more than 250,000 children are severely malnourished and are doomed to die of hunger if left without treatment along with several parts of Africa where locust outbreaks threaten the lives of more than five million people.
The director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities, Mariana Chilton of Drexel University, said that future generations will still see the scars of this pandemic. She noted that people in 2120 are likely to keep talking about this crisis as one of the worst in human history.
According to The Print, the current health crisis has revealed the most profound inequalities and shortcoming of nations worldwide. It has also become a determining force in deciding who gets to eat and who does not, highlighting the social issue where the richest continue to pile on wealth as the poor continue to die off.
