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Hunger and malnutrition may soon hit the world’s largest and poorest cities. This was the dire warning from the United Nations on February 25th. Josette Sheeran, head of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) warned that sky-rocketing food and oil prices are making it very hard for the organization to feed the world’s poorest people. Food prices have risen by up to 40 per cent in the past year. Ms Sheeran told reporters that spiraling global inflation has created a "new face of hunger". She gave the bare and basic facts that the UN no longer had enough money to feed the world’s hungry. "We will have a significant gap if commodity prices remain this high, and we will need an extra half billion dollars just to meet existing…needs," she said. The WFP feeds less than one tenth of the world’s hungry and starving. That figure will greatly decrease if prices continue to escalate.
A worrying new development created by the sharp rises in commodities is that hunger will affect billions of people in cities. Many of those on less than a dollar a day will only be able to afford one daily meal. Sheeran warned that many people can now no longer buy basic food items. She said: "There is food on shelves but people [in urban areas] are priced out of the market.… There are food riots in countries where we have not seen them before." There are many reasons for this upcoming crisis. Developing countries like India and China are demanding more animal feed and their expanding middle classes are buying more food, farmers are using more of their land to grow crops for biofuels, and climate change is creating more floods and droughts. Ms Sheeran appealed to rich countries to donate more money so the WFP could feed the 73 million who rely on it every day.
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