‘This is a perfect storm: climate crisis, debt crisis, cost of living crisis’
‘We’ve got cold extremities, you’ve got a cold heart,’ sang musician Ceitidh Mac at a gig in Newcastle, on the night steep government-sanctioned energy price hikes went into effect in the UK.
The lyrics were apt: ordinary people were being plunged into poverty for the ballooning profits of a handful of corporations.
In blustery Britain with its damp and dilapidated houses – and across gas-hooked Europe – energy prices have dominated headlines. But around the world the greatest impact has been felt in prices of food – a more vital and larger part of people’s budgets, particularly the poorest. In Sri Lanka, where protests spurred by economic crisis felled its President, food inflation stood at 90 per cent in August 2022, leaving even staples like rice unaffordable.1
Everywhere the story is the same: more misery for the many, more profits for the few. Through 2022, roughly one million people were pushed into extreme poverty every 33 hours.2 For 150 million people hunger is a daily reality.3 But champagne dealers are worried about low stocks, as the wealthy rush to buy their finest bottles.4
The hunger crisis has been sharpest in regions particularly impacted by climate change, suffering conflict, or highly reliant on imports of food.5 Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Haiti, and several Central American countries are badly hit, as well as much of sub-Saharan Africa. Worst affected are East Africa and the Horn, where Oxfam warned in mid-October 2022 that one person was likely to die of hunger every 36 seconds until the end of the year across Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.6 In Somalia, acute hunger was more widespread than during the 2011 famine, when a quarter of a million people died, it said.
Margret Mueller, Oxfam’s regional humanitarian co-ordinator for the Horn and East Africa, enumerates the causes: ‘There’s the economic impacts of Covid-19, ongoing conflicts and fragility, and climate change that is impacting the region much more strongly than other regions. That led to an unprecedented four consecutive failed rainy seasons.’ Rains at the end of 2022 also looked set to be low, meaning the earliest chance to bring in a harvest will be June 2023.7
In South Sudan, the majority of the population is acutely food insecure. ‘The “food basket”’, how much a family spends for food in a month – increased 49 per cent in a year, with
