The world now faces its most serious food crisis for many decades. The new global food crisis affects us all. However, it is the roughly 1 percent of the world's population who faced acute hunger even before the Ukraine crisis, those who cannot survive at all without help from aid agencies, who will be the victims if today's food crisis is allowed to deteriorate into multiple simultaneous famines. Second, because it seems unlikely that the underlying causes of this year's crisis will be solved quickly, reducing medium-term reliance on Russia and Ukraine is now a practical necessity. Mark Lowcock was UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator from May 2017 until June 2021.

Source: Manila Times June 11, 2022 22:04 UTC