This is excerpted from an "Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ News" article initially published in March 2024:

Amid growing global concerns over alarming hunger spikes in conflict-affected communities and talk of intensifying levels of food insecurity possibly leading to famine, we looked into how ¨C and when ¨C a famine is classified.

World Food Programme () chief economist Arif Husain walked?Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ News?through the process.

What is the threshold for famine?

Famine is essentially a technical term, referring to a population that faces widespread malnutrition and hunger-related deaths due to a lack of access to food.?

¡°We say there is a famine when three conditions come together in a specific geographic area, whether a town, village, city, even a country,¡± WFP¡¯s Mr. Husain explained.

  • At least 20 per cent of the population in that particular area are facing extreme levels of hunger;

  • 30 per cent of the children in the same place are wasted, or too thin for their height; and

  • The death ¨C or mortality ¨C rate has doubled, from the average, surpassing two deaths per 10,000 daily for adults and four deaths per 10,000 daily for children.

¡°You can clearly see that in a way, famine is admission of collective failure,¡± he said. ¡°We should act way before the famine, so people don¡¯t starve, children are not wasted and people don¡¯t die of hunger-related causes.¡±

How is hunger tracked?

Famines today are different than those experienced in the 1970s or 1980s, when drought was the main driver in Ethiopia and other nations, Mr. Husain told?Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ News, adding that years ago, when a famine occurred, ¡°we could say, ¡®I¡¯m sorry. I did not know. If I had known, I would have done something about it.¡¯¡±

¡°Today, we see crises in real time, so we cannot say we did not know,¡± he explained. ¡°The onus is much higher today than it has ever been before.¡±

Climate-related food insecurity is now closely monitored thanks to a detailed tracking system used by international humanitarian agencies wherever they work, and today, famines or risks of one developing are now largely driven by conflict.

In the 21st century, climate-related famines have largely been averted thanks to an innovative tool to track acute hunger, developed during the crisis in Somalia in 2004 by the Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ Food and Agriculture Organization () and now used by humanitarian agencies worldwide.

This initiative is called the?.

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