AN ALLIANCE is being launched to accelerate action to eradicate acute hunger and poverty, in the hope of making progress towards meeting agreed goals in 2030.
The number of people facing acute hunger today has reached historically high levels — a child dies of malnutrition every ten seconds — and yet the Sustainable Development Goals of eradicating poverty and hunger by 2030 are being missed, the new alliance of governments, banks, charities, and private philanthropists has warned.
Figures from the 2024 Global Report on Food Crises showed that 281.6 million people in 59 countries went hungry last year. According to a UN Food and Agriculture Organization report, the number of people suffering from hunger in the world increased by 122 million people in 2022, when compared with 2019, before the Covid pandemic.
The global alliance against hunger and poverty has been set up to bring together new funding mechanisms and technologies to speed up the eradication of hunger and poverty around the world. Proposed by Brazil’s G20 presidency, the alliance will be launched later next week alongside the G20 leaders’ summit in Rio de Janeiro.
The Christian charity World Vision has joined as a founding member of the alliance.
World Vision said that the trend of rising inequality and hunger had to be reversed urgently. It launched its own campaign last year, “Enough”, which has pledged $3.4 (£2.67) billion over three years to alleviating world hunger (News, 24 November 2023).
“The world is not on track to meet SDG [Sustainable Development Goals] 1 and 2 targets to eradicate poverty and hunger, while inequality is on the rise. We urgently must stop this trend,” the president and CEO of World Vision International, Andrew Morley, said.
The SDGs were agreed in 2015, with a target year of 2030. Yet most, if not all, will not be met by 2030, with lack of financing, Covid, and climate change just some of the challenges affecting progress.
Malnutrition has been found to be often the hidden cause of child deaths and disability, and, where funding exists, it is often spread between several initiatives, reducing its effectiveness.
The World Food Programme is another founder member of the Alliance. It said: “Partnerships and innovation would be the twin engines of the Alliance.”