Two weeks of profits from food tycoons can fund the response to hunger in East Africa

Oxfam Intermón points to the hoarding of "a monstrous amount of wealth at the top of the supply chains"

MADRID, 18 Jul. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The non-governmental organization Oxfam International has indicated this Monday that the amount corresponding to less than two weeks of benefits of the billionaires in the food sector would be enough to finance the entire United Nations appeal to respond to the hunger crisis in East Africa, currently facing a lack of funds.

The NGO has pointed out that the billionaires in this sector have increased their collective wealth by 382,000 million dollars (about 377,000 million euros) since 2020, while the appeal made by the UN is for a total of 6,200 million dollars (close to €6.12 billion), currently barely 16 percent funded, amid high food price inflation.

"A monstrous amount of wealth is being hoarded at the top of global food supply chains," said Hanna Saarinen, head of food policy at Oxfam Intermón. "While rising food prices are contributing to a growing catastrophe that is leaving millions of people unable to feed themselves, world leaders are sleepwalking towards a humanitarian disaster," she warned.

"We need a new global food system to really end hunger. A system that works for everyone. Governments can and should mobilize enough resources to prevent human suffering. A good option would be to tax the super-rich who have seen their wealth skyrocket. at record levels over the last two years," he explained.

In this sense, Saarinen has stated that "this fundamentally broken global food system, which is exploitative, extractive, poorly regulated and largely in the hands of big agribusiness, is becoming unsustainable for people and the planet and is pushing starvation to millions, in East Africa and around the world.

Oxfam has highlighted that people in East African countries spend up to 60 percent of their income on food, in a region that is also highly dependent on imported food. Thus, food and beverages account for 54 percent of the CPI in Ethiopia, while in Somalia maize prices were six times higher than world prices in May from a year earlier.

Likewise, in some Somali regions, spending on the minimum food basket has soared more than 160 percent compared to 2021, with the price of a kilo of sorghum 240 percent higher than the average of the last five years. . In the case of Ethiopia, food inflation has soared 43.9 percent since last year, with a 70 percent increase in food prices between January and May this year, more than double the increase world.

In Kenya, the price of maize flour, the main staple food, doubled in seven months and rose 50 percent in just June-July, a rise in food and energy prices that will increase poverty by a 2.5 percent, pushing around 1.4 million people into extreme poverty.

For their part, the prices of cereals in South Sudan tripled their levels of the previous year in May, while the price of bread has doubled since 2021. Thus, the average price of cereals has been higher than 30 percent of the average of the last five years.

For this reason, Saarinen has emphasized that "the rich nations must immediately cancel the debt of these countries, which has doubled in the last decade, in order to allow them to release resources to face the dizzying increase in hunger and import the grain necessary". "This money can and should be easily recovered by taxing the ultra-rich," she has argued.

Oxfam Intermón has also requested that governments better regulate food markets and guarantee more flexible international trade rules in favor of the most vulnerable consumers, workers and farmers. In this way, he has demanded that governments and donors support small-scale agriculture, which in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa provide more than 70 percent of the food supply.