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The silent famine

Why haven't you heard about the food shortages and increased famine? Simply because the news isn't reporting it. They are too busy with Ukraine and other issues. 

According to the people who set metrics for this sort of thing, a famine isn't official until at least 2 people per 10,000 are dying per day. To put that into annualized perspective, that would be more than three times the rate killed by COVID in the first year of full exposure. Considering the coverage during COVID, and what they are reporting on now instead of this, that's a high threshold.

A quick google reveals that the number of people suffering from hunger worldwide has roughly tripled since 2019. This in spite of more money being spent to feed the world's hungry than ever before. The UN budget for humanitarian aid has gone up 25% per year for several years running.

While wealthy countries such as ours can cut back on the quantity or quality of what we eat,[1] or use debt to finance food, those in poorer countries already use almost all of their income for food, and have no recourse. I have heard firsthand that food staples in at least one nation in Africa now cost 3x what they did this time last year. A quick google shows the food inflation rate of several African countries is indeed as high as >300% (Zimbabwe, for instance) with most being somewhere around 20%. Imagine spending 40% of your income on food, then seeing the price of food double in a year, while everything else goes up, too.

[1] The US spends the lowest percent of its income on food in the world (about 6%) and is more obese than any other nation in the world.