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For 2025, FAO seeks $1.9 bn to provide life-saving, emergency agriculture assistance
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Monday, 09 December, 2024, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Rome
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The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), is seeking $1.9 billion for 2025; to save the lives and livelihoods of some of the world's most food-insecure populations, as acute hunger tightens its grip across the world’s major food crises. With these funds, nearly 49 million people would be able to produce their own food and make their own way out of acute food insecurity. The announcement was made as part of the United Nations’ large-scale humanitarian appeal.
In 2024, escalating violence drove extreme hunger crises in places such as Gaza, the Sudan and Haiti. The number of people facing, or projected to face, catastrophic hunger conditions [classified as Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Phase 5] more than doubled – from 705,000 people across five countries/territories in 2023 to 1.9 million people by mid-2024 in Gaza, Haiti, Mali, South Sudan and the Sudan. Famine conditions were declared in Zamzam Camp in the Sudan, and other parts of the country were at risk.
At the same time, weather extremes driven by the El Niño and La Niña phenomena and the broader climate crisis also pushed millions to the brink. Already vulnerable women, men, girls and boys were critically affected by droughts in Southern Africa, parts of the Pacific and across Central America’s Dry Corridor and severe flooding in West Africa.
Globally, the immediate future is deeply concerning, with no sign that the major drivers of acute hunger – conflict, climate extremes, economic downturns – will ease in 2025.
Beth Bechdol, FAO deputy director-general, said, “Emergency agriculture assistance is a lifeline and offers a pathway out of hunger, even in the midst of violence and climate shocks. It has life-saving impacts on vulnerable populations enabling them to continue producing food locally to feed themselves, their families and their communities. However, we are seeing significant gaps in funding these types of agricultural interventions. In crisis settings, over two-thirds of people rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Yet all too often, just a fraction of humanitarian aid for crises is allocated to protect agricultural livelihoods.”
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