“We’re seeing some western governments walking away from people experiencing extreme hunger,” said Canadian Foodgrains Bank executive director Andy Harrington in a news release.

“This is not the time for us to turn our backs. If we do, people will die.”

The Canadian Foodgrains Bank is a Christian relief and development agency originally established by farmers.

Acute food insecurity and child malnutrition rose for a sixth consecutive year in 2024, affecting more than 295 million people across 53 countries and territories, according to a UN report released on Friday.

This marks a five per cent increase from 2023 levels, with 22.6 per cent of populations in worst-hit regions experiencing crisis-level hunger or worse.

“The sad and distressing fact is that so much of this hunger is completely preventable,” said Harrington.

“The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises paints a staggering picture,” said Rein Paulsen, director of emergencies and resilience at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The number of people facing famine-like conditions more than doubled to 1.9 million — the highest since monitoring for the global report began in 2016.

Nearly 38 million children under five were acutely malnourished across 26 nutrition crises, including in Sudan, Yemen, Mali and Gaza.

“Conflict, weather extremes and economic shocks are the main drivers, and they often overlap,” Paulsen said.

Sharp drop in funding to worsen conditions

Conflict was the leading cause of hunger, impacting nearly 140 million people across 20 countries in 2024, including areas facing “catastrophic” levels of food insecurity in Gaza, South Sudan, Haiti and Mali. Sudan has confirmed famine conditions.

Economic shocks, such as inflation and currency devaluation, helped push 59.4 million people into food crises in 15 countries — nearly double the levels seen prior to the COVID-19 pandemic — including Syria and Yemen.

Extreme weather, particularly El Niño-induced droughts and floods, shunted 18 countries into crisis, affecting more than 96 million people, especially in Southern Africa, Southern Asia, and the Horn of Africa.

Forced displacement also exacerbated hunger. Nearly 95 million forcibly displaced people, including refugees and internally displaced persons, lived in countries facing food crises, such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia.

Looking ahead, the UN warned of worsening conditions this year, citing the steepest projected drop in humanitarian food funding since the report’s inception — put at anywhere between 10 per cent to more than 45 per cent.

Earlier this year, U.S. President Donald Trump largely shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world’s needy, cancelling more than 80 per cent of its humanitarian programs.

“Millions of hungry people have lost, or will soon lose, the critical lifeline we provide,” warned Cindy McCain, the head of the Rome-based World Food Programme.

Some progress seen

“It is a tragedy that for nearly 300 million people on our planet, extreme hunger is a reality through no fault of their own,” said Foodgrains Bank senior humanitarian manager Stefan Epp-Koop.

Epp-Koop travelled with Harrington to South Sudan in March to witness the devastation of the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. He said Foodgrains Bank members and their partners are providing essential aid to people experiencing extreme hunger. New programing has also been approved in countries like Haiti and Myanmar.

Despite the grim overall trend, 2024 saw some progress. In 15 countries, including Ukraine, Kenya and Guatemala, food insecurity eased due to humanitarian aid, improved harvests, easing inflation and a decline in conflict.

To break the cycle of hunger, the report called for investment in local food systems. “Evidence shows that supporting local agriculture can help the most people, with dignity, at lower cost,” Paulsen said.

—With files from Glacier FarmMedia

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The result: The United Nations says that, at best, it will be able to raise enough money to help about 60 per cent of the 307 million people it predicts will need humanitarian aid next year. That means at least 117 million people won’t get food or other assistance in 2025.

The U.N. also will end 2024 having raised about 46 per cent of the $49.6 billion (C$71.4 billion) it sought for humanitarian aid across the globe, its own data shows. It’s the second year in a row the world body has raised less than half of what it sought. The shortfall has forced humanitarian agencies to make agonizing decisions, such as slashing rations for the hungry and cutting the number of people eligible for aid.

The consequences are being felt in places like Syria, where the World Food Program (WFP), the U.N.’s main food distributor, used to feed 6 million people. Eyeing its projections for aid donations earlier this year, the WFP cut the number it hoped to help there to about 1 million people, said Rania Dagash-Kamara, the organization’s assistant executive director for partnerships and resource mobilization.

Dagash-Kamara visited the WFP’s Syria staff in March. “Their line was, ‘We are at this point taking from the hungry to feed the starving,’” she said in an interview.

U.N. officials see few reasons for optimism at a time of widespread conflict, political unrest and extreme weather, all factors that stoke famine. “We have been forced to scale back appeals to those in most dire need,” Tom Fletcher, U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, told Reuters.

Financial pressures and shifting domestic politics are reshaping some wealthy nations’ decisions about where and how much to give. One of the U.N.’s largest donors – Germany – already shaved $500 million (C$719.5 million) in funding from 2023 to 2024 as part of general belt tightening. The country’s cabinet has recommended another $1 billion (C$1.44 billion) reduction in humanitarian aid for 2025. A new parliament will decide next year’s spending plan after the federal election in February.

Humanitarian organizations also are watching to see what U.S. President-elect Donald Trump proposes after he begins his second term in January.

Trump advisers have not said how he will approach humanitarian aid, but he sought to slash U.S. funding in his first term. And he has hired advisers who say there is room for cuts in foreign aid.

The U.S. plays the leading role in preventing and combating starvation across the world. It provided $64.5 billion (C$92.8 billion) in humanitarian aid over the last five years. That was at least 38 per cent of the total such contributions recorded by the U.N.

Sharing the wealth

The majority of humanitarian funding comes from just three wealthy donors: the U.S., Germany and the European Commission. They provided 58 per cent of the $170 billion (C$244.6 billion) recorded by the U.N. in response to crises from 2020 to 2024.

Three other powers – China, Russia and India – collectively contributed less than one per cent of U.N.-tracked humanitarian funding over the same period, according to a Reuters review of U.N. contributions data.

The inability to close the funding gap is one of the major reasons the global system for tackling hunger and preventing famine is under enormous strain. The lack of adequate funding – coupled with the logistical hurdles of assessing need and delivering food aid in conflict zones, where many of the worst hunger crises exist – is taxing efforts to get enough aid to the starving. Almost 282 million people in 59 countries and territories were facing high levels of acute food insecurity in 2023. Reuters is documenting the global hunger-relief crisis in a series of reports, including from hard-hit Sudan, Myanmar and Afghanistan.

The failure of major nations to pull their weight in funding for global initiatives has been a persistent Trump complaint. Project 2025, a set of policy proposals drawn up by Trump backers for his second term, calls on humanitarian agencies to work harder to collect more funding from other donors and says this should be a condition for additional U.S. aid.

On the campaign trail, Trump tried to distance himself from the controversial Project 2025 blueprint. But after winning the election, he chose one of its key architects, Russell Vought, to run the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, a powerful body that helps decide presidential priorities and how to pay for them. For secretary of state, the top U.S. diplomat, he tapped Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has a record of supporting foreign aid.

Project 2025 makes particular note of conflict – the very factor driving most of today’s worst hunger crises.

“Humanitarian aid is sustaining war economies, creating financial incentives for warring parties to continue fighting, discouraging governments from reforming, and propping up malign regimes,” the blueprint says. It calls for deep cuts in international disaster aid by ending programs in places controlled by “malign actors.”

Billionaire Elon Musk has been tapped by Trump to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a new body that will examine waste in government spending. Musk said this month on his social media platform, X, that DOGE would look at foreign aid.

The aid cuts Trump sought in his first term didn’t pass Congress, which controls such spending. Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and close Trump ally on many issues, will chair the Senate committee that oversees the budget. In 2019, he called “insane” and “short-sighted” a Trump proposal to cut the budget for foreign aid and diplomacy by 23 per cent.

Graham, Vought, Rubio and Musk did not respond to questions for this report.

Olympics and spaceships

So many people have been hungry in so many places for so long that humanitarian agencies say fatigue has set in among donors. Donors receive appeal after appeal for help, yet have limits on what they can give. This has led to growing frustration with major countries they view as not doing their share to help.

Jan Egeland was U.N. humanitarian chief from 2003 to 2006 and now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council, a nongovernmental relief group. Egeland said it is “crazy” that a tiny country like Norway is among the top funders of humanitarian aid. With a 2023 gross national income (GNI) less than two per cent the size of America’s, Norway ranked seventh among governments who gave to the U.N. that year, according to a Reuters review of U.N. aid data. It provided more than $1 billion.

Two of the five biggest economies – China and India – gave a tiny fraction as much.

China ranked 32nd among governments in 2023, contributing $11.5 million (C$16.5 million) in humanitarian aid. It has the world’s second-largest GNI.

India ranked 35th that year, with $6.4 million (C$9.2 million) in humanitarian aid. It has the fifth-largest GNI.

Egeland noted that China and India each invested far more in the type of initiatives that draw world attention. Beijing spent billions hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics, and India spent $75 million (C$107.9 million) in 2023 to land a spaceship on the moon.

“How come there is not more interest in helping starving children in the rest of the world?” Egeland said. “These are not developing countries anymore. They are having Olympics … They are having spaceships that many of the other donors never could dream of.”

Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said China has always supported the WFP. He noted that it feeds 1.4 billion people within its own borders. “This in itself is a major contribution to world food security,” he said.

India’s ambassador to the U.N. and its Ministry of External Affairs did not respond to questions for this report.

To analyze giving patterns, Reuters used data from the U.N.’s Financial Tracking Service, which records humanitarian aid. The service primarily catalogs money for U.N. initiatives and relies on voluntary reporting. It doesn’t list aid funneled elsewhere, including an additional $255 million (C$366.9 million) that Saudi Arabia reported giving this year through its own aid organization, the King Salman Humanitarian Aid & Relief Centre.

Restrictions and delays

When aid does come, it is sometimes late, and with strings attached, making it hard for humanitarian organizations to respond flexibly to crises.

Aid tends to arrive “when the animals are dead, people are on the move, and children are malnourished,” said Julia Steets, director of the Global Public Policy Institute, a think tank based in Berlin.

Steets has helped conduct several U.N.-sponsored evaluations of humanitarian responses. She led one after a drought-driven hunger crisis gripped Ethiopia from 2015 to 2018. The report concluded that while famine was avoided, funding came too late to prevent a huge spike in severe acute malnutrition in children. Research shows that malnutrition can have long-term effects on children, including stunted growth and reduced cognitive abilities.

Further frustrating relief efforts are conditions that powerful donors place on aid. Donors dictate details to humanitarian agencies, down to where food will go. They sometimes limit funding to specific U.N. entities or nongovernmental organizations. They often require that some money be spent on branding, such as displaying donors’ logos on tents, toilets and backpacks.

Aid workers say such earmarking has forced them to cut rations or aid altogether.

The U.S. has a long-standing practice of placing restrictions on nearly all of its contributions to the World Food Program, one of the largest providers of humanitarian food assistance. More than 99 per cent of U.S. donations to the WFP carried restrictions in each of the last 10 years, according to WFP data reviewed by Reuters.

Asked about the aid conditions, a spokesperson for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which oversees American humanitarian spending, said the agency acts “in accordance with the obligations and standards required by Congress.”

Those standards aim to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of humanitarian aid, the spokesperson said, and aid conditions are meant to maintain “an appropriate measure of oversight to ensure the responsible use of U.S. taxpayer funds.”

Some current and former officials with donor organizations defend their restrictions. They point to theft and corruption that have plagued the global food aid system.

In Ethiopia, as Reuters has detailed, massive amounts of aid from the U.N. World Food Program were diverted , in part because of the organization’s lax administrative controls. An internal WFP report on Sudan identified a range of problems in the organization’s response to an extreme hunger crisis there, Reuters reported earlier this month, including an inability to react adequately and what the report described as “anti-fraud challenges.”

The U.N. has a “zero tolerance policy” toward “interferences” that disrupt aid and is working with donors to manage risks, said Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Solving the U.N.’s broader fundraising challenges will require a change in its business model, said Martin Griffiths, who stepped down as U.N. humanitarian relief chief in June. “Obviously, what we need to do is to have a different source of funding.”

In 2014, Antonio Guterres, now the U.N.’s secretary-general and then head of its refugee agency, suggested a major change that would charge U.N. member states fees to fund humanitarian initiatives. The U.N.’s budget and peacekeeping missions already are funded by a fee system. Such funding would offer humanitarian agencies more flexibility in responding to need.

The U.N. explored Guterres’ idea in 2015. But donor countries preferred the current system, which lets them decide case by case where to send contributions, according to a U.N. report on the proposal.

Laerke said the U.N. is working to diversify its donor base.

“We can’t just rely on the same club of donors, generous as they are and appreciative as we are of them,” Laerke said.

— Reporting by Jaimi Dowdell, Kaylee Kang, Benjamin Lesser and Raymon Troncoso. Additional reporting by Giulia Paravicini, M.B. Pell, Emma Farge, Gram Slattery, Michelle Nichols, Patricia Zengerle, Charlie Szymanski and Allison Martell.

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“This year’s [Global Hunger Index report] reveals that 58 countries will not reach low levels of hunger, let alone zero hunger by 2030, which is a sobering thought,” said Stefan Epp-Koop, the Foodgrains Bank’s senior manager of humanitarian programs, in a news release today.

The Global Hunger Index is a tool that measures and tracks hunger at global, regional and national levels, “reflecting multiple dimensions of hunger over time,” the index’s website says.

This year’s index, released this fall, showed that progress on reducing hunger around the world has stalled, despite significant headway in some countries.

“The impacts of multiple intersecting crises have stalled progress in the fight against hunger,” Epp said. “Conflict, extreme weather, and economic challenges such as high inflation, have hit communities already vulnerable to food insecurity in a devastating way this year.”

Since 2017, undernourishment, one of the indicators used to calculate the Global Hunger Index, has risen. The number of undernourished people this year was about 735 million, from 572 million in 2017, the index report said.

South Asia and Africa south of the Sahara are the regions with the highest levels of hunger. Nine countries have “alarming” levels of hunger, the index report said–these are Burundi, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Niger, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen.

A further 34 countries measured “serious” hunger, the report said.

There’s still good news, the Canadian Foodgrains Bank said.

Since 2000, the number of countries with measured ‘alarming’ hunger has dropped to nine from 38, the Foodgrains Bank said.

With a concerted, compassionate effort by individuals, organizations and governments, that number can continue to decline significantly in 2024, the organization added.

“It’s encouraging to see that almost every country our members and their partners are working in has improved during this period. There is still a long way to go to ending hunger, but knowing progress has taken place as a result of the work we’re doing motivates us to keep going,” said Foodgrains Bank executive director Andy Harrington.

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Kim gave instructions to revamp irrigation systems, build modern farming machines and create more arable land as he wrapped up the seventh enlarged plenary meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party’s powerful Central Committee on Wednesday.

The meeting began on Sunday to discuss the “urgent” task of improving the agricultural sector.

South Korea has warned of an mounting food crisis in the isolated North, including a recent surge in deaths from hunger in some regions, due in part to what it said was a failure of a new grain policy limiting private crop transactions.

North Korea’s economy has been battered by floods and typhoons, sanctions over its nuclear and missile programmes, and a sharp decline in trade with China amid border closures and COVID-19 lockdowns.

South Korea’s rural development agency estimated the North’s crop production fell nearly four per cent last year from the year before, citing heavy summer rains and other economic conditions.

Kim laid out plans and specific tasks to build “rich and highly-civilized socialist rural communities with advanced technology and modern civilization,” the official KCNA news agency said.

He ordered revamp of the irrigation system to cope with climate change, production of efficient farming machines to modernize production, and reclamation of tidelands to expand farming areas, KCNA said.

A lack of adequate agricultural infrastructure, machinery and supplies including fertilizers and fuel have made North Korea more vulnerable to natural disasters, experts say.

The mountainous country has also sought to expand arable land through tideland reclamation along its west coast since the 1980s, but earlier efforts failed due partly to poor engineering and maintenance.

Under Kim, reclamation projects have been relatively more successful, but with slow progress in converting coastal mudflats into fertile farmland, they did little to ease food shortages, the U.S.-based 38 North project said in late 2021.

“The state media report said they set new goals and action plans, but I don’t see anything new as all of the elements including irrigation and reclamation have already been raised before,” said Lim Eul-chul, a professor of North Korean studies at Kyungnam University in South Korea.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean studies in Seoul, also noted the report did not suggest new ideas or a possible change in the grain policy which South Korea blamed for food shortages.

KCNA said Kim stressed the need to tighten discipline in implementing the economic plan, warning against “practices of weakening the organizational and executive power of the cabinet,” and ordered all party units to “get their working efficiency verified.”

The Central Committee also discussed ways to improve the country’s financial management, KCNA reported, without elaborating.

— Hyonhee Shin is a Reuters political and news correspondent in Seoul.

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The continent is facing its worst food crisis ever, with more than one in five Africans — a record 278 million people — facing hunger, according to United Nations estimates.

A major theme of the three-day summit in the Senegalese capital Dakar was that African countries need to boost their food production capacity rather than relying on imports that have left them vulnerable to price spikes and shortages.

The meeting brought together African leaders, development banks and international partners including the United States, the European Union and Britain to mobilize funding and political commitment.

Around 40 countries from across the continent presented agricultural development plans to the bank and other partners, who pledged support for the plans over the next five years to enable the countries to increase food production.

“We’re going to invest in markets, we are going to invest in infrastructure, energy, we’re going to invest in roads, we’re going to invest in storage, all the things that you need to make agriculture work,” African Development Bank president Akinwumi Adesina told Reuters in an interview.

“We must make sure that agriculture allows people to feed themselves. That’s the core of what we are doing here. It’s embarrassing that Africa is not able to feed itself,” Adesina said.

Heavy debt burdens from the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which raised prices of fuel, grain and edible oils, have added to long-term causes of food insecurity such as climate change and conflict, experts say.

The Ukraine war also disrupted the supply of fertilizer to the continent, pushing prices beyond the reach of farmers.

The bank last year reached a deal and got assurances from fertilizer manufacturers on the continent including Nigeria’s Dangote and Indorama, and Morocco’s OCP that Africa will not be marginalized in the fertilizer supply chain, Adesina said, adding that the bank had made investments in the manufacturers.

“I think we will not have a fertilizer crisis in Africa. The challenge we’re going to have is affordability problem,” he said, adding that governments would have to put support measures in place to make fertilizer affordable for farmers.

— Bate Felix is Reuters’ bureau chief for West and Central Africa, based at Dakar; writing by Nellie Peyton.

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A coalition of gangs has prevented the distribution of diesel and gasoline for over a month to protest a plan to cut fuel subsidies. Most transport is halted, with looting and gang shootouts becoming increasingly common.

“We have for the first time a famine present in Haiti,” Ulrika Richardson, resident and humanitarian co-ordinator for the U.N. system in Haiti, said in a telephone interview.

“The gang violence has cut off the capital from the food-producing south, and that means that we have now an increase in food insecurity.”

A U.N. spokesperson later clarified that Richardson should have described the situation as catastrophic hunger rather than famine.

Richardson said other countries need to do more to support Haiti, as the Caribbean country’s humanitarian response plan for this year has received less than 30 per cent of the required funding.

“While we address the current symptoms of the multiple crises that Haitians are facing… the security and the fuel crisis — we also have to make sure that we invest in the longer-term root causes, such as impunity, such as corruption,” said Richardson, the U.N.’s most senior humanitarian official in Haiti.

Some 19,200 people in Haiti’s Cite Soleil are suffering famine conditions, according to an analysis by U.N. agencies and aid groups on Friday. A famine is declared when at least 20 per cent of the households in a region are suffering famine conditions.

The analysis said that in total 4.7 million people — nearly half of Haiti’s population — are experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity.

The situation was “close to breaking point,” Jean-Martin Bauer, World Food Program country director in Haiti, told reporters earlier.

A U.N. report released on Friday said children as young as 10 and elderly women have been subjected to sexual violence, including collective rapes for hours in front of their parents or children.

“Gangs use sexual violence to instil fear, and alarmingly the number of cases increases by the day as the humanitarian and human rights crisis in Haiti deepens,” said Nada Al-Nashif, the acting human rights chief.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry last week asked for military assistance from abroad to confront the gangs, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has proposed “a rapid action force” to help Haiti’s police.

It is not immediately evident which countries would participate in such a force.

U.S. development agency USAID on Friday sent a disaster assistance response team to Haiti, the agency’s chief, Samantha Power, wrote on Twitter.

Such teams are dispatched in response to natural disasters and complex emergencies, and typically include infectious disease specialists, nutritionists, and logistics experts, according to USAID’s website.

The U.S. State Department has offered support for Haiti’s police and has sent a Coast Guard vessel to patrol the area.

The U.S. and Canada in the coming days will deliver armoured vehicles to the Haitian police that have been purchased by Haiti, U.S. assistant secretary of state Brian Nichols said in an interview with Haitian TV on Thursday.

— Reporting for Reuters by Brian Ellsworth in Miami and Paul Carrel; additional reporting by Michelle Nichols at the United Nations.

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Local conflict and weather extremes remain the primary drivers of acute hunger, aggravated this year by economic instability linked to the ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war.

“The severe drought in the Horn of Africa has pushed people to the brink of starvation. Acute food insecurity is rising fast and spreading across the world. Without a massively scaled-up humanitarian response, the situation will likely worsen in the coming months,” said QU Dongyu, head of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Although global agricultural commodity prices have come off record highs in recent months, local food prices in several countries remain high and risk heading back up if a U.N.-brokered deal to boost Russian and Ukrainian grain and fertilizer shipments collapses.

Ukraine is the world’s fourth largest grain exporter, while Russia ranks third for grain and first for fertilizer exports.

According to the FAO’s quarterly ‘hunger hotspots’ report, co-authored by the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), high prices for food, fuel and fertilizer have forced advanced economies to tighten monetary policy. This has increased the cost of credit for low-income countries, constraining their imports and forcing them to introduce austerity measures.

“These trends are expected to increase in coming months, with poverty and acute food insecurity rising further, as well as risks of civil unrest driven by increasing socio-economic grievances,” said the report.

— Reporting for Reuters by Maytaal Angel.

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Before the coronavirus crisis, 135 million suffered from acute hunger worldwide, Corinne Fleischer, the WFP’s regional director, told Reuters. The numbers have climbed since and are expected to soar further because of climate change and conflict.

The impact of environmental challenges is another destabilizing factor that can drive food scarcity and lead to conflict and mass migration happening.

“The world just can’t afford this,” Fleischer said. “We see now 10 times more displacement worldwide because of climate change and conflict and of course they are inter-linked. So we are really worried about the compounding effect of COVID, climate change and the war in Ukraine,” she said.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the impact of the Ukraine crisis has had massive repercussions, she said, underlining both the import dependency of the region and its proximity to the Black Sea.

“Yemen imports 90 per cent of its food needs. And they took about 30 per cent from the Black Sea,” she said.

The WFP supports 13 million of the 16 million people who are in need of food assistance, but its assistance only covers half a person’s daily needs because of a lack of funds.

Costs had gone up 45 per cent on average since COVID and Western donors have faced massive economic challenges with the war in Ukraine.

For oil-exporting countries such as Iraq, which benefited from the surge in oil prices following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, food security is at risk.

Iraq needs about 5.2 million tons of wheat but only produced 2.3 million tons of wheat, Fleischer said. The rest had to be imported, which cost more.

Despite state support, severe drought and recurring water crises are endangering the livelihood of smallholders all over Iraq, she said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Amina Ismail and Charlotte Bruneau.

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Inhabited by nomadic pastoralists, the semi-arid and remote Karamoja region on the border with Kenya has long lagged behind the rest of Uganda in terms of development. A surge of cattle raids by armed groups this year has worsened the situation.

“People like the elderly, lactating mothers and children, they are dying silently in their homes. They just succumb to hunger,” Jino Bornd Meri, the head of local government for Kaabong district, in Karamoja region, told Reuters.

In one county the district has recorded at least 184 deaths from hunger this month alone, he said.

Moses Okori, leader of the local charity Integrated Community Agriculture and Nutrition (ICAN), said he knew of at least 22 people who had died of hunger this month in Kotido, another district in the region.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) last month said at least 518,000 people, or 40 per cent of the region’s population, were facing high levels of food insecurity.

Local legislator Faith Nakut estimated that at least 600 people had died of hunger in the region since early June.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister’s office, Julius Mucunguzi, said he had received reports of hunger-related deaths but was unable to give an exact toll.

The government dispatched trucks of food to the region last week, he said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Elias Biryabarema.

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The worst drought in decades in parts of Africa and soaring food prices, driven higher by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have sparked repeated warnings about threats to food security for the world’s poorest and possible famines.

At the end of a three-day G7 summit in the Bavarian Alps, the leaders committed the $4.5 billion to protect the most vulnerable from hunger and malnutrition, saying that amounted to $14 billion of assistance committed this year.

They called on those with stockpiles to make food available and said they were working on ways to get grain out of Ukraine, after a Russian blockade of Black Sea ports pushed trade to slower land routes.

They also agreed to step up their efforts to help farmers to keep working in Ukraine, one of the world’s largest grain producers, and address fertilizer shortages.

But activists said the pledges fell short.

“Faced with the worst hunger crisis in a generation, the G7 have simply failed to take the action that is needed. Many millions will face terrible hunger and starvation as a result,” said Max Lawson, head of inequality policy at Oxfam.

“Instead of doing what is needed, the G7 are leaving millions to starve and cooking the planet.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who hosted the summit, defended the money committed when questioned, adding “we won’t stop doing what is necessary” to fight hunger.

The ONE Campaign said the G7 had failed to show global leadership.

“The G7 are talking about a total of $14 billion to fight the food crisis. But this is nowhere near the $21.5 billion that the World Food Programme needs this year alone,” said Stephan Exo-Kreischer, director of ONE Germany.

It added that only $4.5 billion of the money was new and that the G7 had not yet answered how it intended to help break the blockade on the Black Sea that is hindering Ukrainian exports.

Germany and Britain had pushed fellow G7 members to impose temporary waivers on biofuels to combat soaring food prices by increasing supplies of grain and vegetable oil.

There was no waiver in the final communique, as Berlin had anticipated.

The G7 has stressed the blame for rising food prices lies at Russia’s door, which Moscow rejects.

“Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, including its blocking of export routes for Ukraine´s grain, is dramatically aggravating the hunger crisis,” the G7 statement said, adding the group was still committed to lifting 500 million people out of hunger and malnutrition by 2030.

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