Territorial Engineer transformed into a humanitarian professional with a vast international career. Pedro Matos works frequently with the World Food Programme. From Sudan to Bangladesh, from Mozambique to Mali, from Kenya to Ukraine, this Portuguese – emergency coordinator at the UN agency that received the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago this Saturday – is a profound expert on how the world can feed more people . And it is necessary. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have dramatically increased the planet’s food needs.
How do you see the current moment of food emergency in the world, compared to what has been happening in Ukraine since February 24th?
With some concern, not only with Ukraine, but also with covid. The world was making great progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, namely zero hunger. However, it moved away from zero-hunger, but also from many other Sustainable Development Goals, which went back several decades. But zero-hunger has regressed considerably. Right now, we have eight billion people in the world and 10%, 800 million, are food insecure, to a greater or lesser extent. Of those 800 million, 50 million are on the brink of starvation and at risk of dying in the coming weeks or months.
In the World Food Program there is a scale from one to five to classify people’s food situation. How is it explained?
One and two is normal, it means they are people who manage to feed themselves, three are people who start not being able to buy everything they used to or have to skip meals. The four means that people have to sell goods, it could be jewelry or farm animals, they might have to start selling their bodies – prostitution is a very serious problem in several regions of the world -, and the five is people who no longer they have no safety mechanism, suffer from severe malnutrition and are on the verge of dying in the coming weeks or months. And the world has 50 million people in category five, it has 300 million people in category four, and another 500 million in category three. In total, around 850 million people have already started to cut back on their ability to feed themselves or are no longer able to do so at all.
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