The objectives of the present report are threefold.

Firstly, to provide information on the situation in a set of 21 countries and regions considered of maximum concern from a food security perspective.

Secondly, to outline DG ECHO’s interventions to meet rising humanitarian needs.

And lastly, to identify critical needs and opportunities for coordinated action against food insecurity, with a view to scale-up assistance to the populations most in need. It encapsulates information collected from DG ECHO’s field and geographical desks at the end of September 2022 and is intended to provide a more granular picture of the realities from a field perspective.

Climate change and related weather extremes remain a key driver of food insecurity in many of the countries under analysis, such as Kenya, Madagascar, and Somalia, where extreme droughts are causing crops to deteriorate and harvests to fail. Floods and irregular rains in Niger, Mauritania, Chad, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, for example, are bringing about similar consequences.

Many countries are affected by high inflation, notably on food prices. Critical cases include, for instance, Venezuela, with an estimated inflation of 155%; Burkina Faso, where national average prices are 23% (rice) to 70% (sorghum) higher than the average for 2021 and the last 5 years, reaching up to 150 % in some conflict areas (the situation is similar in Mali); and Lebanon, where the prices of the Survival Minimum Expenditure Basket (SMEB) in August 2022 had increased by 1757%, compared to October 2019.

Lastly, escalating internal and regional conflicts continue to have a disproportionate impact on food security (alongside its four pillars of availability, access, utilisation and stability), as well as on livelihoods, markets access, crop yields and the provision of essential services. This translates into the higher numbers of severely food insecure people. In this respect, countries like Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Haiti – among others – have been gravely affected.

Most of the countries under analysis are faced with multiple overlapping challenges at the same time: high food inflation, displacement, increasing insecurity, prolonged effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, structural poverty and lack of governance are only some of the additional causes contributing to the exacerbation of the global food crisis.