Severe famine in Gaza will worsen our hunger pandemic

Understanding the symptoms of a matrix of global governance dysfunctions

- MUSHTAK PARKER

HOW perverse that on the day the UN's top five specialised agencies reported that global hunger in general had declined in 2024 compared with the two previous years, another UN-backed global food security entity Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) issued an alert warning that the "worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out" in the Gaza Strip.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) similarly warns that malnutrition in Gaza has reached "alarming levels with rates on a dangerous trajectory" as the daily death toll of the starving, and victims of the wanton IDF and the so-called US-installed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) violence against the desperate and malnourished hungry, and the scramble for food profiteering by a minority of ruthless local gangs, continue unabated.

As if the world and their callous leaders are reduced to the role of nonchalant bystanders - some playing out the politics of an evangelical ideology inimical to that of a reality show Wild West, and others of lip service beholden to a beauty parade of pious platitudes and a fatuous narrative perfidious to the very liberal democratic values they purport to subscribe to.

Never mind the impact of governance dysfunction and conflict, and the disruption caused by a US Government-driven arbitrary, whimsical, unilateral, fragmented and unpredictable non-rules-based trade and tariff playbook, the world is in the midst of a hunger pandemic and it has the potential to get worse.

According to this year's The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI 2025) report jointly published last Monday by WHO, Unicef, FAO, WFP and IFAD, an estimated 8.2% of the global population, or about 673 million experienced hunger in 2024.