🍽 🌍 📈 Hunger levels have increased across Africa over the last decade—
In every region of Africa, hunger is more prevalent than a decade ago.
The chart shows the increase in the share of the population that is undernourished, comparing 2014 and 2024 (the most recent year available). These estimates come from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
The situation across Africa is dire. In Middle Africa, where hunger is most acute, almost 1 in 3 people are undernourished. In Eastern Africa, the figure is roughly 1 in 4. Across Africa as a whole, it's 1 in 5.
This marks a reversal of a longer positive trend: over the preceding decades, hunger had been falling across much of the world, including parts of Africa.
That progress has now stalled or gone into reverse. Conflict, extreme weather, and the economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic have all contributed.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-undernourishment
📎 Our World in Data
🇮🇱🇺🇸⚔️🇮🇷 Let's take a step back and consider the bigger picture.
Strategic goals on day one of the war:
• Israel: eliminate Iran and Hezbollah as threats to Israel
• Iran: survive, deter future aggression
Fast forward to today, six weeks in, and it's obvious the Israeli war effort has failed. Their ideal state for Iran is Balkanization, or a second Syria, unable to mount any cohesive efforts against Israel. But the Iranian state remains stable, the regime change attempts failed. The IDF again failed to do more than push a few miles into Lebanon. Whatever the Israelis were attempting to do to destroy Hezbollah with the cooperation of the Lebanese government also seems to have failed. And Hezbollah seems much stronger than anyone assumed before this conflict.
The Israeli ability to achieve these goals hinged on sucking the US into maximal commitment in war against Iran. A second GWOT would have been ideal, with the US bogged down in Iran for years or even decades. At the moment, ...