World Bank president David Malpass told the BBC at the IMF-World Bank spring meetings in Washington that record food prices could see hundreds of millions of people forced into poverty if the conflict in Ukraine does not come to an end.
“It’s a human catastrophe, meaning nutrition goes down. But then it also becomes a political challenge for governments who can’t do anything about it, they didn’t cause it and they see the prices going up,” Malpass said.
The World Bank calculates there could be a “huge” 37 percent jump in food prices which will hit the poor the hardest and see them “eat less and have less money for anything else such as schooling,” Malpass continued. “And so that means that it’s really an unfair kind of crisis. It hits the poorest the hardest. That was true also of COVID.”
Regarding the “broad and deep” price hikes, the World Bank chief said it was “affecting food of all different kinds of oils, grains, and then it gets into other crops, corn crops because they go up when wheat goes up.”
Both Russia and Ukraine are key exporters of grain and supply nearly 30 percent of wheat and nearly 20 percent of corn in the global market.
Food prices were up nearly 13 percent in March, the highest on record since 1990, according to the United Nations’ FAO Food Price Index.
Meanwhile, the U.N. has previously warned that Ukraine’s food supply chain is “falling apart” due to Russia’s invasion.
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