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sustainable development goals
730 Million People—Including 20% of Africans—Faced Hunger Last Year
Jul 24, 2024
More than 730 million people around the world faced hunger last year, including 1 in 5 Africans, with over half a billion people set to be chronically malnourished by the decade's end if current trends continue, according to a report published Wednesday by a United Nations agency.
One in 11 people globally went hungry in 2023, the latest U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report revealed.
"The report shows that the world has been set back 15 years, with levels of undernourishment comparable to those in 2008-2009," according to the FAO. "An alarming number of people continue to face food insecurity and malnutrition as global hunger levels have plateaued for three consecutive years."
"Hunger is not something natural. Hunger is something that requires a political decision."
The agency noted significant variation in regional trends as "the percentage of the population facing hunger continues to rise in Africa (20.4%), remains stable in Asia (8.1%)—though still representing a significant challenge as the region is home to more than half of those facing hunger worldwide—and shows progress in Latin America (6.2%)."
"If current trends continue, about 582 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030, half of them in Africa," FAO said, warning that "the world is falling significantly short of achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, Zero Hunger, by 2030."
FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu said in a statement that "transforming agrifood systems is more critical than ever as we face the urgency of achieving the SDGs within six short years. FAO remains committed to supporting countries in their efforts to eradicate hunger and ensure food security for all."
"We will work together with all partners and with all approaches, including the G20 Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, to accelerate the needed change," Qu added. "Together, we must innovate and collaborate to build more efficient, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable agrifood systems that can better withstand future challenges for a better world."
FAO argued that "achieving SDG 2 Zero Hunger requires a multifaceted approach, including transforming and strengthening agrifood systems, addressing inequalities, and ensuring affordable and accessible healthy diets for all."
"It calls for increased and more cost-effective financing, with a clear and standardized definition of financing for food security and nutrition," the agency added.
The new report comes ahead of this November's scheduled G20 Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty Task Force Ministerial Meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. On Wednesday, Qu praised Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—who currently chairs the G20—for centering food security in the bloc's agenda.
In the 2000s, Lula's leftist government implemented plans including Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) and Bolsa Familia (Family Allowance) that significantly reduced malnutrition and poverty in Brazil.
"We need to build on the progress achieved in this region, and share this experience with other regions, especially Africa," Qu said.
Speaking in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday, Lula said that "hunger is not something natural. Hunger is something that requires a political decision."
Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N.'s World Food Program (WFP), said Wednesday that "a future free from hunger is possible if we can rally the resources and the political will needed to invest in proven long-term solutions."
"I call on G20 leaders to follow Brazil's example and prioritize ambitious global action on hunger and poverty," she continued. "We have the technologies and know-how to end food insecurity—but we urgently need the funds to invest in them at scale."
"WFP is ready to step up our collaboration with governments and partners to tackle the root causes of hunger, strengthen social safety nets, and support sustainable development so every family can live in dignity," McCain added.
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10 Principles for Perpetual Peace in the 21st Century
The United Nations-based structures are fragile and in need of an urgent upgrade; we should consider this one at the U.N. Summit of the Future in September.
Jul 24, 2024
Next year will mark the 230th anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s celebrated essay on “Perpetual Peace” (1795). The great German philosopher put forward a set of guiding principles to achieve perpetual peace among the nations of his day. As we grapple with a world at war, and indeed at dire risk of nuclear Armageddon, we should build on Kant’s approach for our own time. An updated set of principles should be considered at the United Nations Summit of the Future in September.
Kant was fully aware that his proposals would face the skepticism of “practical” politicians:
The practical politician assumes the attitude of looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a pedant whose empty ideas in no way threaten the security of the state, inasmuch as the state must proceed on empirical principles; so the theorist is allowed to play his game without interference from the worldly-wise statesman.
Nonetheless, as historian Mark Mazower noted in his magisterial account of global governance, Kant’s was a “text that would intermittently influence generations of thinkers about world government down to our own day,” helping to lay the groundwork for the United Nations and international law on human rights, the conduct of war, and arms control.
Kant’s core proposals centered on three ideas. First, he rejected standing armies. Standing armies “incessantly menace other states by their readiness to appear at all times prepared for war.” In this, Kant anticipated by a century and a half the famous warning by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower of the dangers of a military-industrial complex. Second, Kant called for non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations. In this, Kant inveighed against the kind of covert operations that the U.S. has used relentlessly to topple foreign governments. Third, Kant called for a “federation of free states,” which in our time became the United Nations, a “federation” of 193 states pledged to operate under the U.N. Charter.
Kant put great hopes on republicanism as opposed to one-person rule as a check on war-making. Kant reasoned that a single ruler would readily succumb to the temptation of war:
...a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons, and with perfect indifference leave the justification which decency requires to the diplomatic corps who are ever ready to provide it.
By contrast, according to Kant:
...if the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this [republican] constitution it cannot but be the case), nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war.
Kant was far too optimistic about the ability of public opinion to constrain war-making. Both the Athenian and Roman republics were notoriously belligerent. Britain was the 19th century’s leading democracy, but perhaps its most belligerent power. For decades, the U.S. has engaged in non-stop wars of choice and violent overthrows of foreign governments.
There are at least three reasons why Kant got this wrong. First, even in democracies, the choice to launch wars almost always lies with a small elite group who are in fact largely insulated from public opinion. Second, and equally important, public opinion is relatively easy to manipulate through propaganda to stir the public backing for war. Third, the public can be insulated in the short term from the high costs of war by financing war through debt rather than taxation, and by relying on contractors, paid recruits, and foreign fighters rather than conscription.
Kant’s core ideas on perpetual peace helped move the world toward international law, human rights, and the decent conduct in war (such as the Geneva Conventions) in the 20th century. Yet despite the innovations in global institutions, the world remains dreadfully far from peace. According to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, we are 90 seconds to midnight, closer to nuclear war than at any time since the clock’s introduction in 1947.
The global apparatus of the U.N. and international law has arguably prevented a third world war to date. U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, for example, played a vital role in peacefully resolving the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet the U.N.-based structures are fragile and in need of an urgent upgrade.
For this reason, I urge that we formulate and adopt a new set of principles based on four key geopolitical realities of our time.
First, we are living with the nuclear Sword of Damocles over our heads. President John F. Kennedy put it eloquently 60 years ago in his famous Peace Speech, when he declared:
I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost 10 times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.
Second, we have arrived at true multipolarity. For the first since the 19th century, Asia has overtaken the West in economic output. We are long past the Cold War era in which the U.S. and Soviet Union dominated, or the “unipolar moment” claimed by the U.S. after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. The U.S. is now one of several superpowers, including Russia, China, and India, with several regional powers as well (including Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea). The U.S. and its allies cannot unilaterally exact their will in Ukraine, the Middle East, or the Indo-Pacific region. The U.S. must learn to cooperate with the other powers.
Third, we now have an extensive and historically unprecedented set of international institutions for formulating and adopting global goals (e.g., regarding climate, sustainable development, and nuclear disarmament), adjudicating international law, and expressing the will of the global community (e.g., in the U.N. General Assembly and U.N. Security Council). Yes, these international institutions are still weak when the great powers choose to ignore them, yet they offer invaluable tools for building a true federation of nations in Kant’s sense.
Fourth, humanity’s fate is more tightly interconnected than ever. Global public goods—sustainable development, nuclear disarmament, protection of the Earth’s biodiversity, prevention of war, pandemic prevention and control—are far more central to our shared fate than at any previous time in human history. Again, we can turn to JFK’s wisdom, which rings as true today as then:
So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.
What principles should we adopt in our time that could contribute to perpetual peace? I propose 10 Principles for Perpetual Peace in the 21st Century, and invite others to revise, edit, or make their own list.
The first five of my principles are the Principles of Peaceful Coexistence proposed by China 70 years ago and subsequently adopted by the Non-Aligned nations. These are:
1. Mutual respect of all nations for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of other nations;
2. Mutual non-aggression of all nations towards other nations;
3. Mutual non-interference by all nations in the internal affairs of other nations (such as through wars of choice, regime change operations, or unilateral sanctions);
4. Equality and mutual benefits in the interactions among nations; and
5. Peaceful co-existence of all nations.
To implement these five core principles, I recommend five specific principles of action:
6. The closure of overseas military bases, of which the U.S. and U.K. have by far the largest number.
7. The end of covert regime-change operations and unilateral coercive economic measures, which are grave violations of the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations. (Political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke has carefully documented 64 U.S. covert regime-change operations during 1947-1969, and the pervasive destabilization caused by such operations.
8. Adherence by all nuclear powers (U.S., Russia, China, U.K., France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea) to Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: “All Parties must pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
9. The commitment by all countries “not to strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other countries,” (as per the OSCE Charter). States will not enter into military alliances that threaten their neighbors, and commit to resolve disputes through peaceful negotiations and security arrangements backed by the United Nations Security Council.
10. The commitment by all nations to cooperate in protecting the global commons and providing global public goods, including fulfillment of the Paris climate agreement, the Sustainable Development Goals, and reform of U.N. institutions.
Today’s great power confrontations, notably the U.S. conflicts with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, are largely due to America’s continued pursuit of unipolarity via regime change operations, wars of choice, unilateral coercive sanctions, and the global network of U.S. military bases and alliances. The 10 principles listed above would help to move the world to peaceful multilateralism governed by the U.N. Charter and the international rule of law.
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Young People to World Leaders: 'Time to Let Youth Lead'
"We need more young people represented in all spheres of decision-making—within government, at the United Nations, in civil society, private sector, and academia. And they must be taken seriously."
Apr 16, 2024
"We still believe in the promise of a better world for all. Do you?"
That's how a letter to world leaders, spearheaded by the United Nations Youth Office, begins. It was released Monday, ahead of the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Youth Forum, as part of a campaign arguing that "it's time to let youth lead."
The letter stresses that "all around us, humanity is in peril. The impacts of war and conflict, humanitarian catastrophes, the mental health crisis, and the climate emergency have reached unimaginable heights."
"To rebuild trust and restore hope, we need to see meaningful youth engagement become the norm at all levels."
Last year was the hottest in human history, and temperatures in recent months suggest that trend will continue—largely thanks to planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels. Thousands of children have been killed in fighting around the world, from Ukraine and Sudan to the Gaza Strip—where the death toll has helped spur a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
"But we know that it doesn't need to be this way. While no one nation can solve these challenges alone, it is the inability of leaders to work together in pursuit of the collective good that is putting our common future in jeopardy," the letter states. "We cannot afford to lose hope—the stakes are simply too high. That is why, as young people and allies, we are rallying together as a global community to make our voices heard."
Emphasizing how including diverse perspectives helps to "ensure we don't continue to repeat past mistakes" and that the youth "will live with the consequences of the decisions taken today," the letter calls on "all leaders and institutions to take immediate action to make global policymaking and decision-making spaces more representative of the communities they serve."
"We need more young people represented in all spheres of decision-making—within government, at the United Nations, in civil society, private sector, and academia. And they must be taken seriously," it argues. "To rebuild trust and restore hope, we need to see meaningful youth engagement become the norm at all levels, backed by dedicated resourcing everywhere around the world."
According to the youth, "The Summit of the Future this September will be one important opportunity for governments to commit to finally giving young people their rightful seat at the table."
The summit's U.N. webpage describes it as "a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enhance cooperation on critical challenges and address gaps in global governance, reaffirm existing commitments including to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the United Nations Charter, and move towards a reinvigorated multilateral system that is better positioned to positively impact people's lives."
Ahead of that summit, ECOSOC is hosting the youth forum from Tuesday through Thursday at U.N. headquarters in New York City. Attendees are set to share recommendations and ideas in preparation for the September event.
The young people joining the forum are also expected to participate in discussions focused on five SDGs: partnerships for the goals, no poverty, zero hunger, climate action, and peace, justice, and strong institutions.
"The energy and conviction of young people are infectious, and more vital than ever. Our world is bristling with challenges, tragedies and injustices—many of them linked," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in remarks to the forum on Tuesday.
"In the face of all these crises, public trust is plummeting. Alienation is growing. And the international system is creaking. The future of multilateralism is at stake. And so we need action and we need justice," he continued. "I salute young people around the world for standing up, speaking out and working for real change. We need you. And I am fully committed to bringing young people into political decision-making; not just listening to your views, but acting on them."
Guterres noted that "we established a new Youth Office in the United Nations to advance advocacy, coordination, participation, and accountability for and with young people."
"We will renew the United Nations Youth Strategy—to take this work to the next level. And I am committed to making sure young people have a strong role as we gear up for the Summit of the Future in September," he pledged, detailing various other initiatives.
"Every generation serves as caretaker of this world. Let's be honest: Mine has been careless with that responsibility," said the 74-year-old U.N. chief. "But yours gives me hope. The United Nations stands with you. Together, let's deliver justice. Let's deliver solutions. And let's create a world of peace and prosperity for all."
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