This situation is still expected to worsen in the coming months, according to the 2023 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), produced by a network of 16 agencies and released today in Rome, where the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is located.

"The conflict in Sudan has created the world's largest internal displacement crisis, with an atrocious impact on hunger and malnutrition, especially for women and children," stresses the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, in the preface to the report.

The worsening food situation in Sudan is reflected in the portrait of the entire East African region, but the persistent impact of the unprecedented 2020-2023 drought, El Niño-induced floods, increased conflict and ongoing macroeconomic instability have exacerbated already high levels of acute food insecurity across the eight countries in the region.

A total of 64.2 million people, or 24% of the population analyzed, faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2023 in the region, the report points out, also highlighting the existence of 20.7 million displaced people - 15.9 million internally displaced people and 4.8 million refugees and asylum seekers.

The report reports 12.1 million acutely malnourished children, 3 million of whom suffer from the most severe form in eight countries.

Sudan has become the region's largest food crisis in terms of numbers and has recorded the largest annual deterioration due to the outbreak of conflict on April 15, 2023.

Burundi, Djibouti, Somalia and comparable areas of Kenya have also seen a significant deterioration in acute food insecurity situations.

In South Sudan, the situation remained persistently dire, with 63% of the population experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity.

The analysis of Ethiopia in the 2023 report is not directly comparable to that of 2022, but together with Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia, it is part of the group of countries with "major protracted food crises", in the words of the GRFC.

In the Central and Southern Africa region, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continued to host the largest food crisis in all 13 countries in 2023, with 25.8 million people facing acute food insecurity, more than half of the 49.6 million people, or 21% of the population analyzed throughout the sub-region of the continent.

Here too, the number of displaced people - 10.1 million people in 13 countries -- was heavily fueled by the security crisis in the Congolese province of North Kivu.

The report records a total of 3.9 million acutely malnourished children in five Central and Southern African countries facing the food crisis, of whom 1.2 million suffer from the most severe form of wasting.

If the DRC is the country in all of Africa with the highest number of people facing food insecurity, the Central African Republic is the one facing the biggest crisis in terms of percentage of the population (44%, a percentage equivalent to 2.7 million people).

Some countries, such as Malawi and Zimbabwe, as well as localized areas of Mozambique, namely Cabo Delgado province, and Zambia, experienced a worsening of acute food insecurity compared to the 2022 report.

In contrast, the DRC, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia showed slight improvements.

The escalation of conflicts in West Africa and the Sahel, the third sub-Saharan African region isolated in the report, continued to fuel "high levels of acute food insecurity in 2023", although the overall percentage of the population affected in the sub-region (11%) had decreased, compared to 2022 (12.5% of the population analyzed), the worst year since this report began to be produced, eight editions ago.

The study recorded 44.3 million people in acute food insecurity in all 14 countries in the sub-region. The number of displaced people reached 9.7 million in 13 countries in a food crisis situation in 2023 - 7.5 million internally displaced people and 2.2 million refugees and asylum seekers.

The number of acutely malnourished children in 14 countries in food crisis rose to 14 million, of whom 3.9 million suffered from the most severe form of wasting last year.

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