Growing hunger, high food prices in Africa don't have to become worse tragedy.

The cascading global events of the 2020s seems to have no end in sight. The once-in-a-century pandemic (COVID-19) has been followed by the destructive Russian invasion in Ukraine, strong inflationary pressures around the world linked, ominously, to a surge in global food and energy prices.

As the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared recently, we are living the perfect storm caused by the tangled web of food, energy, and financial crises.

This is not the first time the world has faced the threat of massive hunger and starvation following a spike in food prices. In 2007-2008 and in 2010-2011 food prices suddenly increased following a three-decade hiatus when food prices were stable and low.

However, the current shock is of a different magnitude: as the graph below shows, the surge in food prices, reflected in the Food and Agriculture OrganizationA's Food Price Index, is the highest recorded since 1961 - even higher than the surge in the first half of the 1970s, during the infamous 1973 Oil Crisis.

The cost of food is 42% higher now than 2014-2016.

To make matters worse, the food price shock comes at a time when food security was already under stress.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, world hunger increased substantially - estimates from the State of Food Security and Nutrition around the World (SOFI) reveal that as many as 161 million people fell into hunger between 2019 and 2020, bringing the worldA's total to 811 million people facing food insufficiency. In other words, about one in 10 people in the world went to bed without enough nutrition in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Africa badly hit

Africa has been particularly vulnerable: about 21% of people on the continent suffered from hunger in 2020, a total of 282 million people. Between 2019 and 2020, in the aftermath of the pandemic, 46 million people became hungry in Africa. No other region on the world presents a higher share of its population suffering from food insecurity.

Also, African households spend a large share of their income on food. According to a recent note in the Financial Times, citing estimates from the IMF, food represents 17% of expenditure in advanced economies, in sub-Saharan Africa the figure is 40%.

'Hunger is a many-headed monster,' wrote Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen in their influential 1989 monograph Hunger and Public Action. Dreze and Sen were describing the multiple deprivations (biological, social, and economic) associated...