Benevolence and Humanitarian Aid Not Enough in Tackling Hunger
By Irene Gaitirira
Published August 4, 2020
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to add 83 million – 132 million people on the list of the hungry by the end of 2020.
“It is not enough to respond with humanitarian assistance alone. We have to build crisis-resilient supply chains, otherwise people will keep going to bed hungry,” warns Dominik Ziller, the new Vice President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) of the United Nations who has just taken office. “Five years ago we, the global community, made a promise when we adopted the Sustainable Development Goals. We are completely off track in achieving Zero Hunger, and we only have 10 years left to fulfill our promise.”
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Saying that ‘majority of the world’s poorest and hungriest people depend on agriculture and related activities for their livelihoods’ that are now being disrupted by COVID-19, Ziller calls upon governments and development partners to ‘build crisis-resilient supply chains’ to keep hunger at bay.
The adverse impact of COVID-19, coming at a time when the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World released in July 2020 shows that hunger has increased in the past five years, do not make an already bad situation any better.
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IFAD is an international financial institution and specialized agency of the United Nations dedicated to eradicating rural poverty and hunger in developing countries. Ziller, a German national and former Director-General for International Development Cooperation at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
