On Twitter, UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said that this is a call for urgent and collective action to crack down on food insecurity and child malnutrition.

Also, the US diplomat shared a link with her comments on UNICEF´s latest report on food crises.

This UN international alliance, the European Union (EU) and other bodies warned that severe food insecurity has been ceaselessly increasing since 2017, when first report was published.

As Henrietta Fore stressed, the situation outlined in this year´s report is deeply worrying, as the pandemic has made an already fragile nutrition situation even worse.

As the world grapples with the Covid-19 pandemic, we need to keep the spotlight on the scale and magnitude of the many crises that continue to affect children, women, their families and communities. And we need to continue focusing our attention to responding where the need is the greatest, she said.

Before the pandemic, one in three children were already not growing properly because of malnutrition. Despite progress over the years, 149 million children are still affected by stunting, 45 million children are suffering from wasting and at least 340 million have vitamin and mineral deficiencies, she recalled.

‘For children living in the 55 countries experiencing a food crisis, the situation is especially dire. The pandemic has deepened this crisis, disrupting diets, services and practices that protect children and their families from under-nutrition, she regretted.

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