SDG 2: Zero hunger

Let's start this article with a surprising fact. During the years of the pandemic, deaths due to hunger have outnumbered deaths caused by the coronavirus.

Everything is a cycle and this fact is a direct consequence of what we have analysed in the article dedicated to SDG 1, which you can read here. The increase in poverty derived from the pandemic, the climate crisis, the interruptions in food supplies, as well as the growing war conflicts, are producing a true "hunger pandemic" as Oxfam says.

Yemen, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Sahel, Ethiopia, Sudan and Syria are the places with the highest rates of starvation. However, according to the same organisation, "hunger has also intensified in new countries such as Brazil, India and South Africa, countries that have been affected by the largest increases in Covid-19 infection rates".

This is therefore unprecedented. The World Food Programme tells us that 2020 has doubled 2019 in terms of people who have been acutely food insecure.
According to the UN, more than 2.3 billion people (i.e. 30% of the world's population) lacked access to adequate food in 2019.

This indicator has increased in a single year, in 2020, as much as in the previous five years combined.

Additionally, children have paid the highest price. It is estimated that more than 145 million children suffer the consequences of hunger. This is particularly serious because hunger leads to major developmental problems and diseases in the medium and long term, as well as drastically increases child mortality. Hunger is a problem that never comes alone, that always has consequences, and a person affected by starvation means that he or she has already been in a cycle of poverty and scarcity for a long time.

Malnutrition has a considerable impact on the development of the nervous system, in which it causes structural and functional problems.

Because of malnutrition and undernutrition, many children do not complete their brain development in the same way as their peers who have access to a complete and healthy diet. This leads to many difficulties and health problems for these children in the future.

According to the World Health Organisation, 55% of the 13 million children who die each year between the ages of 0 and 5 are malnourished. This means that if these children were not hungry, more than half of those deads wouldn't happen.

Hunger often affects these children even before they are born, as maternal nutrition during pregnancy is crucial for the proper neurological development of the foetus. Many premature births and malformations result from a lack of nutrients and vitamins during pregnancy.

Those of us who have been lucky enough to become pregnant in countries with guaranteed and safe access to health care know that from the beginning of pregnancy we are prescribed folic acid, that particularly important B vitamin for the development of our babies. Folic acid is in many of the foods we normally eat, but during pregnancy we are taking care of a life that is being created from scratch, so the intake of folic acid must be much higher than the levels we usually consume. The same goes for iodine, or omega 3 and so many other vitamins and healthy fats, always important for our health, but crucial during our pregnancy. The lack of all these vitamins can cause serious defects in the formation of organs, especially the pancreas, and serious congenital anomalies affecting the spine, the spinal cord or the brain.

Do you think that every woman in the world has access to a vitamin-rich diet during pregnancy? The answer is obviously no. And poor maternal nutrition during pregnancy not only greatly increases the chances of vital malformations, but also increases the complications that may arise during pregnancy and childbirth.

It is no coincidence that around half of all foetal deaths occur in: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, China and Ethiopia, in order of incidence, according to Unicef. Almost all of these are resource-poor countries, and stillbirths are more prevalent in rural and poorer areas within these countries than in urban areas or in better-off families.

In less developed countries, with worse hygiene conditions, without access to safe and healthy food for future mothers and without access to guaranteed healthcare, foetal death is a very serious problem, and it is not uncommon to find that only half of a woman's children have survived.

Hunger causes also rickets, people are shorter, they have less strength, they have a very weak immune system and their cognitive development is not completed properly. What effects does this have? The countries with higher rates of malnutrition and undernutrition are those where young people drop out of school early because they don't understand many of the concepts. They are countries with people who cannot fight diseases properly because of their weakened immune systems, so life expectancy is not high. These are countries with many people employed in low-skilled jobs, where, unfortunately, in many cases they have no job security either.

Hunger is therefore a serious and endemic problem in many communities that impoverishes and darkens us as a global society.

According to a UN report, if this trend continues, SDG 2 would be missed by a margin of almost 660 million people, and of these 660 million, some 30 million may be related to the lasting effects of the pandemic.