UN World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director David Beasley during a UN Security Council session on food security and maintaining international peace and stability has said that the world stands on the brink of two pandemics, a health/Covid pandemic and due to its economic impact and supply chain disruption, a hunger pandemic.

He said that In 2020, they thought that by the end of the year and by 2021 Covid would be behind us and that the economies and systems would be surging back to normal. Unfortunately he said, new waves of Covid have been unrelenting and the concerns of 2020 are now a reality for 2021.

He said that while Covid is undeniably exacerbating fragility around the world, manmade conflict is driving instability and powering a destructive new wave of famine that threatens to sweep across the world. He explained that the toll being paid in human misery is unimaginable.

He said that the WFP’s food insecurity projections for 2021 are truly shocking. Beasley painted a grim picture of 135 million people facing crisis levels of hunger or worse, coupled with an additional 130 million on the edge of starvation prompted by Coronavirus, noting that WFP currently offers a lifeline to nearly 100 million people – up from about 80 million just a few years ago.

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