According to the announcement of the new report of the United Nations Organization for Food and Agriculture, the global pandemic of Covid-19 revealed the fragility of national agri-food systems by playing an important role in the latest increase in global estimates of hunger.

“The world is at a critical juncture,” the statement said and detailed the economic consequences of the pandemic, the closure of schools that deprived hundreds of millions of children of school meals, to variability and climatic extremes and the persistence of hunger and malnutrition.

“The time has come to build resilience,” the FAO stated in a preview of its report and warned that world food security and nutrition are at stake, as well as stressed that three billion people cannot access a healthy diet.

The report shows that an additional one billion would join their ranks if a shock reduced their income by a third, and added that food costs could increase for up to 845 million people if there were an interruption in the links of critical food transportation.

The theme of this year’s report responds to the call of the United Nations Food Systems Summit to promote a series of concrete actions that people around the world can take to support the transformation of the world’s agri-food systems.

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