All around the world, the coronavirus and its restrictions are pushing already hungry communities over the edge, cutting off meager farms from markets and isolating villages from food and medical aid.
Virus-linked hunger is leading to the deaths of 10,000 more children a month over the first year of the pandemic, according to an urgent call to action from the United Nations shared with The Associated Press ahead of its publication in the Lancet medical journal.
“The food security effects of the COVID crisis are going to reflect many years from now,” said Dr. Francesco Branca, the World Health Organization head of nutrition. “There is going to be a societal effect.”
The economic, food, and health systems disruptions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic are expected to continue to exacerbate all forms of malnutrition.
Estimates from the International Food Policy Research Institute suggest that because of the pandemic an additional 140 million people will be thrown into living in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 U.S. per day in 2020.
From Latin America to South Asia to sub-Saharan Africa to America, more families than ever are staring down a future without enough food. The analysis, published late July this year, found that about 128,000 more young children will have died over the first 12 months of the virus.
In April, World Food Program head David Beasley warned that the coronavirus economy would cause global famines “of biblical proportions” this year.
"There's a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself," Beasley said.
There are different stages of what is known as food insecurity; famine is officially declared when, along with other measures, 30% of the population suffers from wasting.
The agency had estimated in February that one in every three people in Venezuela was already going hungry, as inflation rendered many salaries nearly worthless and forced millions to flee abroad. Then the virus arrived.
“The parents of the children are without work,” said Annelise Mirabal, who works with a foundation that helps malnourished children in Maracaibo, the city in Venezuela thus far hardest hit by the pandemic. “How are they going to feed their kids?”
These days, many new patients are the children of migrants who are making long journeys back to Venezuela from Peru, Ecuador or Colombia, where their families became jobless and unable to buy food during the pandemic. Others are the children of migrants who are still abroad and have not been able to send back money for more food.
The agency had estimated in February that one in every three people in Venezuela was already going hungry, as inflation rendered many salaries nearly worthless and forced millions to flee abroad. Then the virus arrived.
“The parents of the children are without work,” said Annelise Mirabal, who works with a foundation that helps malnourished children in Maracaibo, the city in Venezuela thus far hardest hit by the pandemic. “How are they going to feed their kids?”
These days, many new patients are the children of migrants who are making long journeys back to Venezuela from Peru, Ecuador or Colombia, where their families became jobless and unable to buy food during the pandemic. Others are the children of migrants who are still abroad and have not been able to send back money for more food.
[Who's caring for those children since obviously not their absent parents, I wonder.]
Dr. Francisco Nieto, who works in a hospital in the Venezuelan border state of Tachira, said aid groups have provided some relief, but their work has been limited by COVID-19 quarantines.
Deaths of children younger than 5 had declined steadily since 1980, to 5.3 million around the world in 2018, according to a UNICEF report. About 45 percent of the deaths were due to under-nutrition.
The leaders of four international agencies — the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization — have called for at least $2.4 billion immediately to address hunger.
Even more than the money, restrictions on movement need to be eased so that families can seek [help] treatment, said Victor Aguayo, the head of UNICEF’s nutrition program.
“By having schools closed (where many children got their ONLY meal of the day), by having primary health care services disrupted, by having nutritional programs dysfunctional, we are also creating harm,” Aguayo said. He cited as an example the near-global suspension of Vitamin A supplements, which are a crucial way to bolster developing immune systems.
In Afghanistan, restrictions on movement prevent many families from bringing their malnourished children to hospitals for food and aid just when they need it most.
Afghanistan is now in a red zone of hunger, with severe childhood malnutrition spiking from 690,000 in January to 780,000 — a 13% increase, according to UNICEF. Food prices have risen by more than 15%, and a recent study by Johns Hopkins University indicated an additional 13,000 Afghans younger than 5 could die.
Yemen is now on the brink of famine, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which uses surveys, satellite data and weather mapping to pinpoint the places most in need. A UNICEF report predicted that the number of malnourished children could reach 2.4 million there by the end of the year, a 20% increase.
Fatma Nasser, a 34-year-old mother of seven, is among three million displaced people in Yemen who don’t have enough money to feed themselves or their children. She lives on one meal a day. Ibrahim Nasser, the father, lost his only source of income, fishing, after roads to the sea were closed because of the coronavirus.
The mother’s milk dried up, and the baby lived on formula. But doctors say families tend to use less milk powder to save money, and babies don’t usually get enough nutrition.
Some of the worst hunger still occurs in sub-Saharan Africa. In Sudan, 9.6 million people are living from one meal to the next in acute food insecurity — a 65% increase from the same time last year.
Lockdowns across Sudanese provinces, as around the world, have dried up work and incomes for millions.
“By having schools closed (where many children got their ONLY meal of the day), by having primary health care services disrupted, by having nutritional programs dysfunctional, we are also creating harm,” Aguayo said. He cited as an example the near-global suspension of Vitamin A supplements, which are a crucial way to bolster developing immune systems.
In Afghanistan, restrictions on movement prevent many families from bringing their malnourished children to hospitals for food and aid just when they need it most.
Afghanistan is now in a red zone of hunger, with severe childhood malnutrition spiking from 690,000 in January to 780,000 — a 13% increase, according to UNICEF. Food prices have risen by more than 15%, and a recent study by Johns Hopkins University indicated an additional 13,000 Afghans younger than 5 could die.
Yemen is now on the brink of famine, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which uses surveys, satellite data and weather mapping to pinpoint the places most in need. A UNICEF report predicted that the number of malnourished children could reach 2.4 million there by the end of the year, a 20% increase.
Fatma Nasser, a 34-year-old mother of seven, is among three million displaced people in Yemen who don’t have enough money to feed themselves or their children. She lives on one meal a day. Ibrahim Nasser, the father, lost his only source of income, fishing, after roads to the sea were closed because of the coronavirus.
The mother’s milk dried up, and the baby lived on formula. But doctors say families tend to use less milk powder to save money, and babies don’t usually get enough nutrition.
Some of the worst hunger still occurs in sub-Saharan Africa. In Sudan, 9.6 million people are living from one meal to the next in acute food insecurity — a 65% increase from the same time last year.
Lockdowns across Sudanese provinces, as around the world, have dried up work and incomes for millions.
The global economic downturn has brought supply chains to a standstill, and restrictions on public transport have disrupted agricultural production. With inflation hitting 136%, prices for basic goods have more than tripled.
“It has never been easy but now we are starving, eating grass, weeds, just plants from the earth,” said Ibrahim Youssef, director of the Kalma camp for internally displaced people in war-ravaged south Darfur.
Before the pandemic and lockdown, Zakaria Yehia Abdullah, 67, a farmer in the Krinding camp in West Darfur, said his family ate three meals a day, sometimes with bread, or they’d add butter to porridge. Now they are down to just one meal, in the morning, of “millet porridge” — just water mixed with grain. He said the hunger is showing “in my children’s faces.”
While malnutrition deaths routinely rise during the four-month wait for the next harvest in October, this year is worse than anyone can remember, according to physicians and aid workers.
[That article was written in MAY, so within TWO MONTHS, half of America was reeling.]
With the first of the month coming in less than two weeks, more than a fifth of adults report they have just slight or no confidence in their ability to make their next rent or mortgage payment on time.
The findings come from a new weekly survey the bureau rolled out last month to try to gauge how the outbreak is altering lives in the U.S.
Bloomberg points out that food banks in Vermont have to deal with "miles long" lines of cars and at Covid testing sites in Florida, people have to show up with full tanks of gas because of how long they have to wait.
People applying for unemployment have similar horror stories - as we have detailed - trying to pile onto an overwhelmed website to collect benefits and left with no one to call when the system doesn't function properly. The physical waits in unemployment lines are similarly distressing.
In one week in late July nearly 30 million Americans reported they did not have enough to buy food to eat, according to a government survey.
Among households with children, one in three reported insufficient food, the highest level in the nearly two decades the government has tracked hunger in America, said Lauren Bauer, who studies food insecurity at the Brookings Institution.
“What’s happening with children right now is unprecedented in modern times,” Ms. Bauer said.
AMERICA AT HUNGER'S EDGE
Whenever food deliveries came, in Cicero, just west of Chicago, Jennifer Villa’s kids would celebrate. “Oh, Mommy, we’re going to have food tonight,” they would tell her.
BAD SITUATIONS MADE WORSE
Manausha Russ, 28, a few days after George Floyd riots led to the closure of a nearby Family Dollar, where Russ used to get basics like milk, cereal and diapers. “The stores by my house were all looted,” she says.
Planting, harvesting and transporting food items has been dwindling, and there seems no end to that in sight as governments the world over REFUSE to acknowledge that more people ESPECIALLY children and the frail elderly, are suffering and dying, and will continue to do so, from their INSANE rules than from this over-hyped "KILLER VIRUS".
Maybe this news that there are hundreds of thousands of uncounted victims each week/month is exactly what they want?
If so, damn them.
When this is over, they should be tried for CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY!
"We lived in hardship before, and now it is even harder. It is hard for us to find food every day. If things go on like this, the people will erupt like a volcano — they will say, 'Better that we go back to work and die of coronavirus than that our children starve to death!'" -- A 22-year-old logistics worker from a village in Syria.
//WW
“It has never been easy but now we are starving, eating grass, weeds, just plants from the earth,” said Ibrahim Youssef, director of the Kalma camp for internally displaced people in war-ravaged south Darfur.
Before the pandemic and lockdown, Zakaria Yehia Abdullah, 67, a farmer in the Krinding camp in West Darfur, said his family ate three meals a day, sometimes with bread, or they’d add butter to porridge. Now they are down to just one meal, in the morning, of “millet porridge” — just water mixed with grain. He said the hunger is showing “in my children’s faces.”
While malnutrition deaths routinely rise during the four-month wait for the next harvest in October, this year is worse than anyone can remember, according to physicians and aid workers.
On the World Food Program’s hunger map, nearly all of Burkina Faso is a red zone of need.
FROM BACK IN APRIL:
The next global pandemic may very well be a hunger pandemic as a result of the fallout from coronavirus.
The new coronavirus has led to cratering economies, mass job losses and spiking food prices.
Quarantine regulations, shipping challenges, and overall supply chain issues are compounding and adding to previously existing starvation conditions," Ian Bradbury, CEO of the Canada-based humanitarian organization 1st NAEF, told Fox News.
"We can expect more global deaths due to secondary impacts of COVID-19 than the virus itself — the World Food Program currently estimates that 265 million will be on the brink of starvation by the end of the year."
At the beginning of 2020, some 130 million were already facing dire levels of hunger. That figure could now more than double the number of people facing acute hunger to 265 million by the end of this year.
Remember when American farmers/ranchers were having to let food crops rot in fields, piling mountains of potatoes in fields to spoil, pouring milk on the ground after schools restaurants closed and killing food animals and burying them in mass graves when there were no more restaurants ordering supplies and when processing plants were shut down?
FARMS BECAME "NONESSENTIAL", farm workers had to be laid off.
Then came all the wildfires, storms, flooding, droughts, etc, and Spring crops went unplanted or were ruined by weather.
A nation doesn't recover quickly from such setbacks.
Now, we're in Winter and the pandemic rules being enforced by state governments plus weather are still wreaking havoc in the USA, as elsewhere.
Who hasn't seen prices soar in grocery stores?
What will heating fuels, gasoline rise to, or electricity?
Those in control have created their very own "PERFECT STORM" and we all are in the eye of that monster.
Who in America would have imagined in 2018 that we'd see the National Guard helping to hand out food to families in New York, or that we'd see cars lined up for miles in Texas just to get food help?
Members of the New York National Guard help to organize and distribute food to families on free or reduced school lunch programs in New Rochelle, N.Y., Thursday, March 12, 2020. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Thousands of people lined up in their cars in Dallas on Saturday to receive food from the North Texas Food Bank (NTFB) ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday next week. (CBS, Dallas)
The same scene that was seen in San Antonio in April (below) can still be seen today across America. .
In Florida this week, in Detroit, Michigan and in California, coast-to-coast and border-to-border, the coronavirus pandemic has taken a hit in the paychecks of close to half of U.S. households just since March, the Census Bureau says.
FROM BACK IN APRIL:
The next global pandemic may very well be a hunger pandemic as a result of the fallout from coronavirus.
The new coronavirus has led to cratering economies, mass job losses and spiking food prices.
Quarantine regulations, shipping challenges, and overall supply chain issues are compounding and adding to previously existing starvation conditions," Ian Bradbury, CEO of the Canada-based humanitarian organization 1st NAEF, told Fox News.
"We can expect more global deaths due to secondary impacts of COVID-19 than the virus itself — the World Food Program currently estimates that 265 million will be on the brink of starvation by the end of the year."
At the beginning of 2020, some 130 million were already facing dire levels of hunger. That figure could now more than double the number of people facing acute hunger to 265 million by the end of this year.
Remember when American farmers/ranchers were having to let food crops rot in fields, piling mountains of potatoes in fields to spoil, pouring milk on the ground after schools restaurants closed and killing food animals and burying them in mass graves when there were no more restaurants ordering supplies and when processing plants were shut down?
FARMS BECAME "NONESSENTIAL", farm workers had to be laid off.
Then came all the wildfires, storms, flooding, droughts, etc, and Spring crops went unplanted or were ruined by weather.
A nation doesn't recover quickly from such setbacks.
Now, we're in Winter and the pandemic rules being enforced by state governments plus weather are still wreaking havoc in the USA, as elsewhere.
Who hasn't seen prices soar in grocery stores?
What will heating fuels, gasoline rise to, or electricity?
Those in control have created their very own "PERFECT STORM" and we all are in the eye of that monster.
Who in America would have imagined in 2018 that we'd see the National Guard helping to hand out food to families in New York, or that we'd see cars lined up for miles in Texas just to get food help?
Members of the New York National Guard help to organize and distribute food to families on free or reduced school lunch programs in New Rochelle, N.Y., Thursday, March 12, 2020. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Thousands of people lined up in their cars in Dallas on Saturday to receive food from the North Texas Food Bank (NTFB) ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday next week. (CBS, Dallas)
The same scene that was seen in San Antonio in April (below) can still be seen today across America. .
In Florida this week, in Detroit, Michigan and in California, coast-to-coast and border-to-border, the coronavirus pandemic has taken a hit in the paychecks of close to half of U.S. households just since March, the Census Bureau says.
[That article was written in MAY, so within TWO MONTHS, half of America was reeling.]
With the first of the month coming in less than two weeks, more than a fifth of adults report they have just slight or no confidence in their ability to make their next rent or mortgage payment on time.
The findings come from a new weekly survey the bureau rolled out last month to try to gauge how the outbreak is altering lives in the U.S.
Bloomberg points out that food banks in Vermont have to deal with "miles long" lines of cars and at Covid testing sites in Florida, people have to show up with full tanks of gas because of how long they have to wait.
People applying for unemployment have similar horror stories - as we have detailed - trying to pile onto an overwhelmed website to collect benefits and left with no one to call when the system doesn't function properly. The physical waits in unemployment lines are similarly distressing.
J. Jeffrey Inman, a marketing professor and associate dean at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business, said: “The U.S. is getting a dose of the scarcity economy, and we don’t like it. The U.S. has gotten spoiled where we’ve always had a plentiful, efficient supply chain. Now we’re seeing what can happen once it gets disrupted.”
U.S. job losses have reached Great Depression levels. Did it have to be that way?
Covid-19 has cost more than 33 million Americans their jobs in the last seven weeks – 10% of the entire US population.
In conversations around the country this August — at kitchen tables, in living rooms and in cars during slow-moving food lines with rambunctious children in the back — Americans reflected on their new reality.
U.S. job losses have reached Great Depression levels. Did it have to be that way?
Covid-19 has cost more than 33 million Americans their jobs in the last seven weeks – 10% of the entire US population.
In conversations around the country this August — at kitchen tables, in living rooms and in cars during slow-moving food lines with rambunctious children in the back — Americans reflected on their new reality.
The shame and embarrassment.
The loss of choice in something as basic as what to eat.
The worry over how to make sure their children get a healthy diet.
The fear that their lives will never get back on track.
There was the family in Jackson, Miss., that relied on a local food bank over the summer, even though before the pandemic they had been making almost six figures a year.
There was the family in Jackson, Miss., that relied on a local food bank over the summer, even though before the pandemic they had been making almost six figures a year.
Among households with children, one in three reported insufficient food, the highest level in the nearly two decades the government has tracked hunger in America, said Lauren Bauer, who studies food insecurity at the Brookings Institution.
“What’s happening with children right now is unprecedented in modern times,” Ms. Bauer said.
AMERICA AT HUNGER'S EDGE
Whenever food deliveries came, in Cicero, just west of Chicago, Jennifer Villa’s kids would celebrate. “Oh, Mommy, we’re going to have food tonight,” they would tell her.
BAD SITUATIONS MADE WORSE
Manausha Russ, 28, a few days after George Floyd riots led to the closure of a nearby Family Dollar, where Russ used to get basics like milk, cereal and diapers. “The stores by my house were all looted,” she says.
Planting, harvesting and transporting food items has been dwindling, and there seems no end to that in sight as governments the world over REFUSE to acknowledge that more people ESPECIALLY children and the frail elderly, are suffering and dying, and will continue to do so, from their INSANE rules than from this over-hyped "KILLER VIRUS".
Maybe this news that there are hundreds of thousands of uncounted victims each week/month is exactly what they want?
If so, damn them.
When this is over, they should be tried for CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY!
"We lived in hardship before, and now it is even harder. It is hard for us to find food every day. If things go on like this, the people will erupt like a volcano — they will say, 'Better that we go back to work and die of coronavirus than that our children starve to death!'" -- A 22-year-old logistics worker from a village in Syria.
//WW
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