Hunger crisis sparked by coronavirus could kill more than virus itself, Oxfam warns

A hunger crisis sparked by coronavirus could kill more people than the virus, Oxfam has warned.

The poverty charity said the social and economic fallout from the crisis could push 121 million to the brink of starvation by the end of this year.

A stark new report, ‘The Hunger Virus,’ warns mass unemployment and a hit to food supply chains could kill 12,000 people a day globally by Christmas.

This would top the peak daily mortality rate for Covid-19, which was just over 10,000 deaths per day in April 2020.

The authors identified the top ten most extreme hunger hotspots as Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Syria, Sudan and Haiti.

The West African Sahel, covering Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, Senegal, and Nigeria, is also named.

However, Oxfam warns that more developed middle-income countries have seen “millions of people who were barely managing have been tipped over the edge by the pandemic”.

In India, for example, traders have also been unable to reach tribal communities during the peak harvest season for forest products, depriving up to 100 million people of their main source of income for the year.

Meanwhile in Brazil, the third worst-hit nation during the pandemic, millions of poor workers, with little in the way of savings or benefits to fall back on, lost their incomes as a result of lockdown.

Only 10 percent of the financial support promised by the federal government had been distributed by late June with big business favoured over workers and smaller more vulnerable companies, Oxfam said.

Oxfam’s Interim Executive Director Chema Vera said: “COVID-19 is the last straw for millions of people already struggling with the impacts of conflict, climate change, inequality and a broken food system that has impoverished millions of food producers and workers.

“Meanwhile, those at the top are continuing to make a profit: eight of the biggest food and drink companies paid out over $18 billion to shareholders since January even as the pandemic was spreading across the globe ―ten times more than the UN says is needed to stop people going hungry.”

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