 Welcome this evening to the sixth annual Great Decision Series, and this is co-sponsored by the Meade Public Library and the Sheboygan Branch of the American Association of University Women, which incidentally is celebrating its 100th year of empowering women and girls this year. Yes. Thank you. We always welcome new members to help us with our mission, and so membership information is available on the Sheboygan Branch's website. So if you put Sheboygan AEUW into whatever search engine you have, it will pop up and you can become a member, and I encourage you to do that because we're great people. The Sheboygan Branch of AEUW gives scholarships every year to non-traditional women students. This year we gave three $3,000 scholarships to local non-traditional women students, and they are excellent people. Another project of the branch is our annual STEM event for sixth to ninth grade girls to inspire them to consider careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. Last year we registered 86 girls. This year our event is November 4th. Registration information is available on our branch website or Facebook. Great Decisions is a project of the Foreign Policy Association, which also publishes a book and DVD with information about eight timely topics. You can order a book or DVD through the Foreign Policy Association online. We are indebted to the work of the Mead Librarian Aubrey Locks. Where's Aubrey? She's not here. Okay. For her work in arranging the schedule of these programs, our final topic will be war crimes. Before introducing tonight's speaker, I would like to thank Scott Miliff, Director of WSCS, and his cameraman for taping our Great Decisions programs for viewing on WSCS. Tonight's topic is Global Famine, and will be presented by Elizabeth Wheat, Ph.D., Associate Professor in Public Environmental Affairs and Political Science at the UWGB. Dr. Wheat completed her Master's Degree in Public Affairs at Indiana University and her Doctorate in Political Science at Western Michigan University. She is currently pursuing a Master's in Social Work at UWGB with a field placement at World Relief working with refugees. That's really cool. Elizabeth teaches courses in Global Environmental Politics, Environmental Law and Policy, and Natural Resources, to name a few. She also serves on the board for Midwest Environmental Advocates, Wisconsin Conservation Voters, and the Green Bay Water Utility. She is a proud dog mama to three rescue pups and co-exists with her adopted cat. Oh my gosh, a reg doll named Dolly Potton. That's cute. Dr. Wheat will speak for 45 minutes. Afterwards, we'll have about a 15-minute Q&A. We need to leave the room by 8 o'clock, so we'll keep that in mind as we go take questions. And if Dr. Wheat talks a little bit longer, that'll be fine. But we'll stop yet, about 7.30. So please raise your hand if you have a question, and wait for me to bring the mic to you. That way everybody will be able to hear what you're asking. So, welcome Dr. Wheat. Thank you. Yes, thank you. All right. Thank you very much for inviting me back. I really, I love being part of this series, both here and in Manitowoc. Sometimes it's in my area of expertise, other times it's a brand new topic. And I think as an educator, I'm still a student at heart and really enjoy learning about topics. So thank you very much for coming tonight. So the overview tonight, we'll be looking at one of the most extreme situations right now of global famine. There are currently about 345.2 million people projected to be food insecure in 2023. This is double what we faced just three years ago in 2020. And it's 200 million people more than the pre-pandemic. 900,000 people are trying to survive in famine-like conditions, which is five times the rate of just five years ago. 828 million hungry people exist in the world, with 349 million facing severe hunger. So we really are observing the largest global food crisis in modern history, which is part of why I would suspect the Foreign Policy Association chose this as a topic to feature this year. We first have to start by looking at what is famine. And you can see the UN definition up here. Famine is declared when malnutrition is widespread and when people have started dying of starvation through a lack of access to sufficient nutritious food. And so certain conditions have to be met before a famine can be designated. And we'll talk about some of those conditions and how those get applied. But there's a few characteristics to highlight first. And think of this really as a combination of multiple factors interacting, but we'll talk about some of the primary ones. So when we're looking at the characteristics, the first one is the lack of access to adequate food. And we'll talk more about food insecurity in a couple of those slides. The next is acute malnutrition. This is looking at the deprivation of essential vitamins and this can cause developmental delays and a whole host of problems, especially for children. And another aspect without malnutrition is stunted growth and then also making people more prone to disease. We'll discuss impacts with COVID a bit later, but all of these are really are complex factors that can have pretty big impacts on a person's body. With poor health, this will relate to stunted growth, but also people being more likely to dive illness, being underweight, risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. And so famine is going to be one of these contributing factors to a lot of other issues. And then we have excess mortality or death. 45 million people are at the emergency phase of food insecurity right now, which is the last step before famine. So we've got a lot of people really on the edge of an even worse situation. The issues of hunger and food insecurity often get talked about interchangeably with famine, but they're really different meanings. And so looking at what the FAO will describe hunger as the physical discomfort caused by a lack of food. It becomes chronic if someone doesn't consume enough calories or dietary energy on a regular basis. So it's one thing if you skip lunch, you might be a little bit of extra hungry at dinner. That's going to be different than if you're going days and days without food. And so when this happens on a regular basis, it will affect your ability to lead a healthy life and then going to cause more problems. With food insecurity, this is looking more at access. And so here it's lacking regular access to enough, obviously the resources and nutritious food that you need to develop and to grow and to again lead that healthy, active life. This could be due to a lot of reasons. Maybe there's an unavailability of food in the area that you're in and we'll talk about some countries where that's a problem. It could also be a lack of resources to obtain food. Maybe you're in a civil war torn area and there isn't a safe way to get to a store or we're seeing right now in Ukraine where the stores don't exist. So there can be a lot of factors for that access. And so the connection essentially here is if someone is food insecure and they run out of food, they're likely going to experience hunger over time that can lead to malnutrition and insecurity. The IPC classification is one that you'll see on the next slide as well. Phase five is the famine stage. And I'll show you a graphic with the first four stages. But when we get to phase five, it's a system that's designated by the UN to evaluate what a country's food situation is like. It'll look at a lot of different reports, different factors. It's great data if you really want to, if your numbers cruncher and want to see the visuals on this. It's a good site. And there's a state of food security report that they publish and nutrition that looks at global food crises. And so I'll be showing you quite a few from that. So the thought may be a little tiny to see. Don't worry about it too much. Green is going to be the entry level. So no food insecurity, no crisis at that point. Okay, that's the top one. At that point, a household is able to meet their basic needs. And we're focused mostly on, the last column just says priority response objectives. So you've got the phase, the description, and then the response. So a phase one response is going to be a lot of resilience building, maybe advanced food packets if there's a disaster, a little bit preventative and kind of immediate response driven. Phase two, which is the, or citrus orange we'll go with, light orange. The, there we go. The households have enough food, but they're unable to afford some essential non food, essential non food expenditures. Okay. And so they're starting to engage in some stress behaviors. So maybe they're having to travel a little bit further. Maybe they're having to go to a food bank. The response at that stage is still disaster risk reduction and trying to protect the livelihood. So people can afford food. Phase three is where it starts to get pretty dangerous at this stage. A household has either a gap in their food consumption that can lead to malnutrition or they're only able to meet their basic needs. If they use their essential household assets. So maybe they're having to sell items, sell a car to pay for food that that phase three is the urgent action required. So at this point, the international aid community starts to get really concerned and really involved. How do we protect livelihoods? How do we provide food? Okay. At phase four, that's our emergency stage. And at this point, bigger food consumption gaps, huge nutrition problems, malnutrition problems. And you can only meet those consumption gaps if you use emergency strategies and you really start to liquidate all of your assets. Okay. So at that point, the response is to save lives and livelihoods. And so these are bad, right? None of these stages are great. So by the time we get to the actual famine stage on the bottom, households lack food. They lack basic needs. They don't have a lot of coping strategies available. We're looking at starvation, death, destruction, malnutrition. And so the action at that point is to start preventing death and total collapse of these livelihoods. And so none of these are great, but we have a lot of people at that famine stage. And so we'll talk about some of the challenges that presents. This is just a nice graphic. I won't spend too much time on. But I think it highlights the different elements of food security. So the big four are availability, access, stability and utilization. Sometimes famine gets talked about primarily with, well, we can't access the food that exists, but we can't get to it. And it's really more complicated than that. And I think in the last three years, we've seen more examples of this where it can just be hard to get to things. Like you think of the toilet paper shortages or how long we had to search for pasta for some reason for a while. We saw these breaks in the supply chain, but we're also not in a country where we can live without pasta. I mean, it's sad, but we're not going to starve if we can't get our spaghetti. And other countries don't. If you have a heavy grain dependent country and we look at that availability with the production, if grain is not going to be produced, that's a huge part of your diet. It's going to be more expensive for you to get grain if there's not as much out there, your classic supply and demand. Safety and hygiene and storage. One of the issues that's contributing to a lot of the African famine issues is the storage capabilities. And with a lot of developing countries, storage can be a challenge. Eating fresh, you go to the market, you buy what you need as you're going to use it. It's hard to hold on to things for a while. So it's hard to stockpile in case there's a crisis. All right, we'll take a look at a few of the causal factors with famine. A conflict is going to be one of the biggest. And this will be a common theme that we see in the case studies and one of the most difficult barriers to overcome in actually addressing famine. 70% of the world's hungry people live in areas that are facing war and violence. And so I'll talk through a few of the ways that conflict contributes to famine. Starting with a forced displacement, you can have multiple aspects of this where communities who live off the land, if they're forced to move, then they're disconnected from their food source because they're living off the land that they would own. Conflict can also jeopardize agriculture and livestock. And so we're really seeing this right now again in the Ukraine with grain crops being affected because the conflict has gone on for so long. Additionally, people are not able to work or earn money. So when the food prices rise, it can be very difficult to afford those additional expenses. And then depending on the conflict, aid organizations may not be able to reach affected people with humanitarian aid. And we'll see this in one of the case studies as well. And then lastly with increased migration, we'll talk about this when we discuss Ethiopia. But people are fleeing to areas for safety and also for resources. This really is putting a tremendous strain on other countries that are welcoming people that are fleeing, the refugees that are fleeing. And the journey itself is also difficult. It's not like there's a lot of places where sanitation and food provisions along the way mentioned in my introduction. I finished my placement at World Relief in May and I worked with a lot of Afghan clients who had fled when the Taliban took over. And just hearing their stories of not just the emotional trauma of leaving, but just the difficulty of it. Especially if you had young children, how to take care of them, how to provide food for them. Because these are families who are fleeing with what's on their back and what they can carry. And so when you look at really long migrations and depending on how welcoming the country is that they go to, you can really see a lot of food crisis problems happening. With the experts looking at climate change, we've heard a lot about this on the news. The last couple of days have been a little toasty around here too. We're all seeing different measures and impacts with climate change. Globally we're seeing more extreme weather events, flooding, cyclones and droughts. And these climate shocks can really have a big impact on people already on the edge. They're disrupting crops and livelihood. It can make it really difficult for people to feed themselves. With chronic poverty, if you're unable to afford nutritious food, that can contribute to under nourishment and then making it difficult to work to then afford more food. And so the poverty really just makes it very difficult. We talk a lot in the U.S. about food deserts. Green Bay has been working through this quite a bit of not having grocery stores with fresh, healthy produce available in certain areas of town. So like there isn't a good grocery store downtown in downtown Green Bay. Third largest city in the state. So if you're someone who lives downtown, if you don't drive, if you don't have a car, our mass transit is not great. It can be really difficult to access healthy produce. And globally that's going to be even more of a challenge. And then with global fertilizer costs, this has been a big, big challenge, particularly with the conflict in Ukraine. Global food prices, fertilizer prices have climbed faster than food prices. And those food prices are also at a 10-year high. The war in Ukraine has really disrupted global fertilizer production. We might not have known, I didn't know until I started getting into this topic that Ukraine was such a big producer of global fertilizer. I was not aware of that connection. And so it was another aspect of that conflict, really having a global impact. The crops you see listed here of wheat, maize, soybean, and rice, production of all four of these declined in 2022. And so we are also getting really concerned about a food availability crisis that's looming. And then lastly, looking at operating costs of organizations. The food prices have also hit them, and the fuel prices have hit them. So if you want an example, World Food Program, which you'll hear about a lot tonight, they're the main UN organization that does a lot of food programs and aid relief. They have a really good global monitoring system. Their costs of operation in 2022 were 44% higher than what they had been in 2019. That's the difference of feeding 4 million people for one month. It's a huge, huge impact. They spent $14 billion in 2022 doing their work. That's a lot of money, and it is an unsustainable budget. And so it really is a red flag for us to start thinking about some of the systemic issues so that World Food Program isn't needed that much because they can't sustain. They're not going to be able to get that level of funding year after year. But there's a need for it, if not even for more. The visuals, again, this is a really cool map. You can go to the World Food Program's website and just put in Hunger Map. And this will look different every time you pull it up. So on the very bottom, you see those little icons. The first one is hazards. Then you have conflict. Then you have undernourishment. The little people are food consumption, vegetation, rainfall. And then it'll give you the food level classification. Remember that five is famine. Changes all the time. I love GIS maps. I think they're fascinating. And so you can see here the blue circles are the percentage of people living in areas with rainfall. And so there's a lot of different metrics. And so I'm going to show you screenshots throughout the presentation of what some of these countries look like based on the live GIS map. All right, we'll look at some of the impacts of COVID on famine. And I will preface this by saying that there are a lot of different aspects. I focused on the ones that were most relevant to our topic tonight. There's certainly no shortage of difficulties there. And we also don't know entirely the long-term effects of this. Right now it is projected to have a long-term famine projections. 30 million more people are projected to be undernourished by 2030 because of disruptions from the pandemic. So again, I don't have a lot of good stats tonight. I'm very sorry. They're not cheerful. We'll get to the cheerful part at the end, but there's a lot of dark numbers to get us there. Let's first look at food insecurity. As many people have experienced, even in the U.S. and other developed countries, reduced incomes had a big impact. And that contributed to a lot of health issues. 5.5 million children in East Africa are facing high levels of malnutrition, largely due to compound COVID effects, intense drought, and then the Ukraine crisis. It's a very grain-dependent area. Less than 40% of children in the Middle East and Northern Africa have access to the nutritious diets that they need to grow properly. And then we have increased vulnerability from COVID for both the elderly and immunocompromised. COVID makes you more vulnerable to malnutrition. Malnutrition also makes you more vulnerable to different diseases. And so you have this unfortunate cyclical effect of not being able to get enough food, needing to eat to fight that pandemic, along with other illnesses. And then you have varying levels of access to treatment. And whether that's medicine or vaccines, there are a lot of moving pieces with that COVID treatment that are very easy to access in a developed country, really challenging, especially in some rural areas of developing countries. For economic effects, it's projected that the economic impact of COVID-19 may result in $29.7 billion in losses in 2022, just due to the excess stunting in child mortality. It's huge, and it's just one slice of metrics that we're looking at. So more burdens on the healthcare system, education system. We'll talk about some other effects on children in a bit. But I do want to have one happy stat for you. For every dollar invested in nutrition, $16 is returned to the local economy. So there's some promise there. And that's part of why eight organizations and schools and governments are trying to do more of these kinds of programs where they can invest in whether it's a school meals program, which we'll talk about, or other ways to address nutrition aspects. For the supply chain disruptions, this led to increased food prices and higher rates of food insecurity. This had a really disproportionate effect on small-scale farmers and people who were kind of in an informal market, so different sellers or traders. So you think about, you know, in some of the islands of the Philippines or Indonesia, there will be sort of a local shop where the shop owner will buy supplies coming in and then sell them for a slight markup to make a profit in the community. That's how the family survives. And there's a very, very small margin of profit in these cases. If they have to pay higher prices to get those goods coming in, they're not going to be able to sell that back to the community and make a profit. They might at best break even. And because they're in the informal market, there's not a government to go to necessarily. There's not aid that you can access. There's just not the resources that a lot of developed countries have. And then we also have restricted supply deliveries. We experienced that with shortages of technology, of toilet paper, of, again, the root spaghetti thing. I apparently eat a lot of pasta. I'm very hungry all the time. But, you know, we had a lot of those shortages, some really trivial, some really significant. Mentioned in my bio, you know, I have dogs. I had a lot of health issues that came up with my animals in the pandemic. And there was a supply shortage and disruption of medicine that they needed for anesthesia. A good friend is fighting cancer. There was a disruption in her cancer medication availability. And so this against small examples and really life-threatening ones that we experienced too. And then with fatalities, the World Health Organization estimates around 7 million deaths globally. The caveat there from COVID. The caveat there is some countries deny COVID exists, so they don't report deaths. And the other factor is whether or not they report a death as due to COVID. Some states don't. And the U.S. actually isn't doing that as much now once the public health emergency ended. Okay. It can hurt hospital metric data, essentially. And so there's a lot of reporting things. But even if it's really low, there's still a lot of people. These people had communities. They had families. They were working in the economies. And so it's a big impact. Some of the different case studies have to talk about the Ukraine here and pre-Russia invasion. So if we look at November 2021, just a few months before Russia went in, 28% of Ukraine's population experienced moderate to severe food insecurity. That's before the conflict. Okay. It's projected to increase to as high as 40. And I will say that is very likely higher now because in July, I believe it was July of this summer, Russia withdrew from an agreement that allowed the Ukraine to import grains in the sea. So a lot of the Russia-contested area has been in southern Ukraine with the Odessa port. And Russia had an agreement in the Black Sea with the Ukraine to allow Ukraine to import grain. And they withdrew from that. And it's had just devastating effects. We'll talk about what it did for Yemen in a little bit, but it's affected global prices. Russia is getting very frustrated with the pace of the Ukraine conflict. And this was one way to essentially weaponize food and weaponize poverty. Then we get to the displacement aspect. A lot of people have had to flee the country. We're now starting to see some trying to go back. But there's massive displacement. People often lost their employment. And then we see a lot of harm to the crops and harvesting. The war has damaged nearly a third of the entire global wheat market. Okay. And this has led to some of the highest food commodity rates we've ever seen. With the economic impacts, global food prices have surged at their fastest rate ever just in March with a 13% jump for record highs. And so if you're an import dependent country, which a number of the Middle East and Northern African countries are, they're having to pay so much more for grain-based foods and for grain itself. The prices have just skyrocketed. I'll give you a few examples. The cost of the minimum monthly food needs is up 351% in Lebanon, 97% in Syria, 81% in Yemen. And it's not like food was achieved to begin with. That's the increased percentage. Wheat flour and cooking oil can be up as much as 47% in the region. These are tremendous increases in countries that were already struggling with poverty. In Somalia, wheat and oil prices increased 300%. And one of the poorest countries in the world. Related to all of this is in higher natural gas break. Now this has been fluctuating quite a bit this year. But in, so in August of the conflict, the price is going to skyrocket about 80% per megawatt hour. Europe was hit the hardest because they receive about 40% of their natural gas from Russia, but it travels through the Ukraine. And so as the US has put sanctions on Russia, it made it difficult to do business. Russia is, of course, stopping a lot of the transport of the natural gas through the Ukraine. Germany was having the most vocal about the challenges that they've experienced. But it really has been a big issue for a lot of the European countries. And this is the hunger map of Ukraine. And so you can see the darker and area is the worst. So red is going to be kind of our worst area. At above 40% that are experiencing insufficient food consumption. And you can see again on the eastern side, we also see with a lot of conflict close to the Russian border and then in the south. I took this screenshot a couple of months ago. I would guess that if you pulled one today after the grain blockade has been put in place, I would guess you see much hot, the kind of the yellowish ones in the south. I would bet you see those closer to red now because they're not able to get the grain that they used to be able to. And as population numbers and a lot of other rates that you can look at, on the left-hand side, you see the trend up. Not good. Basically people with problems of food consumption. That's what the top one is. On another really cheerful case study, it's important to look at what's going on with Somalia. About 200,000 people are at risk of famine, 1 million in need. And recent humanitarian assessments put Somalia at a stage five. And over 3 million people aren't unable to meet their daily food needs. The three biggest factors are conflict, high food prices, and drought. With the conflict, El Shabaab, which is an Islamic militant group, controls some areas, and the Somali transitional government controls other areas. And so civilians are getting killed at very high rates. And the fighting parties are cutting off access to the supplies and services that are important for those civilians. A third of the people who need help are living in areas controlled by El Shabaab. So they really are trying to starve civilians into compliance or to starve them in a way to persuade them to support the militant group because the government is so limited as to what it can provide. The UN Emergency Relief Coordinator characterized this by saying hunger is used as a tactic of war, which applies not just to Somalia but really to every case study that we're going to look at. Additional risks with climate change are hitting Somalia very hard, particularly droughts, floods, desertification, and water scarcity. When you look at where a lot of the temperatures are worsening, they're hitting sort of sub-Saharan Africa very, very hard right now. So they're unable to grow crops and need a lot of assistance in that area. Somali refugees primarily flee to Kenya and Ethiopia. And think about what we've just learned about the challenges Ethiopia is facing. Now you have an influx of refugees further straining your limited resources. In Kenya, there's the Dabab refugee camp. It's one of the largest in the world. It actually looks like a midi city. So it'll have generators, five different units of it. Over 80,000 people arrived most in the last two years just from these conflicts. 24,000 arrived from last September to December. That's a huge increase. And I can say that especially having been a case manager now where I had two families, it's a lot of work to get someone settled in a new place and to provide them with services and we're in a developed country where we have services to provide. Getting an influx of that many people is really difficult to sustain. And so you have limited resources in these refugee camps, cholera outbreaks. And then the last estimate extra from July 2020, so very likely higher now, was 218,873 refugees and asylum seekers in this camp. It's bigger than Green Bay. Green Bay proper. So when you think of camps, we're not talking tents and little pitched fire stoves. We're talking small cities that we call camps implying that they are temporary. What also makes it tricky with Kenya is that Kenya will not grant Somali's refugee citizenship. So when you're a refugee, you basically have three choices. You can return home, claim asylum in your new country or you resettle in a third country. Kenya's basically saying option A or C is what you need to go with. Go home, go elsewhere. So the refugee, the Somali refugees, there are multi-generations that are living in this camp. They have only known refugee life in that camp. And so it really is a dire situation for Somalia and putting a big strain on Kenya and Ethiopia too. The whole country's red. So it's just a very difficult environment. You're looking at very high rates of malnutrition, about just a 15 million people with insufficient food combination. And the population is around 16.4. So almost the entire population is facing insufficient food consumption in Somalia. Looking at Nigeria, Nigeria is facing a lot of issues with Boko Haram. And you may have heard about them a few years ago, but more than we do now, they attack both military and civilian targets. But they're the organization that became sort of most infamous for kidnapping children, particularly women and girls. And so that was what they were involved in. And so that's kind of some of the conflict background with this. And we'll circle back to kind of why that's an issue too. This is also a country on the brink of famine, particularly in the Northeast where that conflict is taking place. 4.1 million people are facing acute food insecurity. And most people are at a three or four on a food insecurity scale. So it is really dire for a lot of people. And it's projected to worsen as the lean season comes up, which takes us back to that storage issue. It's really difficult to store goods and crops to get you through the tougher seasons. Many of the people in this area are unreachable for humanitarian assistance. And so it's difficult to do accurate assessments. It's difficult to figure out not only what people need, but how do we get it to them? Really, really dangerous areas to work in. And then at the macroeconomic level, a lot of new economic policies have been put in place in recent years. But they're dealing with currency shortages, lower government revenue as crude oil production changes. And with so much they can produce, and other countries, primarily Middle Eastern countries, have upped their production. The U.S. also has tried to increase production. And Nigeria has a very oil dependent economy. And so it's been difficult to replace that revenue. And then food inflation rates have been rising. They did have an election in March 2023. And I think it was right around the time that I was talking about this in Manitowoc. And my notes were a little more optimistic at that point. There was tremendous hope for this election that people were really frustrated with what was going on with the government. You get to see the results of it. So still a heavily contested election. And it ran into a lot of logistical issues with polling stations, but also the currency loss, which you might not think about having an impact on an election, but people couldn't afford to get to polling sites. And so they had a record youth turnout, but turnout as a whole was down. And so the incumbent party is re-elected. It's a new president, but it's the same political party. And so we're just going to kind of wait and see to what policy changes are going to be put in place. We just don't know yet. I'm optimistic that there was a pretty good youth turnout because in every country, that's an obstacle that we face. So I'm hoping that that signals a new direction that the country wants to go in. We'll have to wait and see on that one. And then this is Nigeria's map. So similar, we don't have any information on the southwestern quarter. Most of our information is from the other three quarters of the country. We don't have accurate population data, so it makes it difficult to say what percentage is affected, but about 50.4 million people exist with insufficient food consumption, and those are just the ones we know. And so it's still a very dire situation. But hopefully the new government can make some progress on that. And then we mentioned Ethiopia a few times. Ethiopia primarily in the northern region is also on the brink of famine, with 13 million people in need of food assistance. And the famine risk has gone down very slightly as they've tried to put in different farming techniques or roads to transport goods a little bit easier, but still have a ways to go. In 2022, their agricultural season had a lower than average harvest. And so households had to use their own supplies much earlier, and then they had to rely on the markets for additional food. But they had less purchasing power and less income to do that. And so it really stressed a lot of the economic options that they had. Also in the northern areas, there's been more of the conflict has been. And, you know, the Tigray area temporary was a good word choice on that one. The Tigray area was temporarily calm, and they were able to restore a lot of resources until April of this year. And it was actually right after, I think within right after I gave the, I talked about this before, because at that point, the aid halted. You might be asking, why would you halt humanitarian aid to one of the worst areas in the world? Well, as it is estimated, 1,400 people in Tigray have been starved to death since the aid was suspended. Now the World Food Program in USAID, who are the main donors, didn't make this decision lightly. What they discovered in the investigation is continuing that they found that the aid was being distributed on alternate markets. And last count I saw was about 500 cases of corruption where people were government officials and others were taking the aid and reselling it. So the aid was not getting to the communities that needed it. And so they felt that the appropriate decision at the time was to halt the aid until they can figure out a way to make sure it gets where it needs to go. But it's led to a lot of deaths as a result of that decision. Another group in the UN office, the UN is called the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. They have been able to access some areas outside of Tigray, Tigray against one of the northern provinces. They're still seeing a lot of displaced people because now you have people trying to get out of Tigray because there's no food there. So they're trying to go to other countries or trying to go to other parts within Ethiopia. Let's not leave out the south and southeastern areas of Ethiopia. This is where we see the drought. Tremendous loss of livestock and reduced livestock production. And then also the reduction in household access to food and income. These are both going to be exacerbated by climate change. And then at the country level, Ethiopia is also struggling with low government revenue, very high inflation, high import costs. Government has also reduced fuel subsidies. So it makes your fuel more expensive to purchase. And food prices have also climbed. And so there are a lot of moving pieces that have made it a very difficult space. And here you can see, again, the areas that are affected. Tigray is the one at the very top on the left. And it's such a difficult area and we just don't have good data on it right now. It is very likely worse than what we are projecting or anticipating. Looking at the south Sudan, they're on the brink of famine. So they're currently classified as a level three. South Sudan became an independent country a number of years ago from Sudan and really have struggled in a lot of areas since. Civil war has led to mass displacement and a lot of abandoned fields, which is going to contribute to the crop issues that we've discussed. 7.76 million, but two-thirds of the population face food insecurity. 1.4 million children malnourished. Conflict will be a common theme. It's displaced about 3.5 million people and disrupted the agricultural productions. Here you also get flooding. So flooding is taking out the crops, taking out livestock. Over half of the country's water points have been damaged and led to more cholera outbreaks as well. Some countries actually, some counties in the country are also experiencing more drought, some drought conditions, but flooding has been a big one there. It is also one of the most dangerous places to be an aid worker with 319 violent incidents in 2022 that target humanitarian personnel. And so it's really been challenged for the aid workers to even get in there and do anything. It kind of depends on the country. It could be an attack on the village. It could be an explosive bomb. It could be kidnapping, could be burning down the village, killing all the crops, slaughtering the livestock. It really just kind of depends on if you're looking at political violence or if you're looking at, I mean, actually the food supplies and that kind of issue. So it's not just human beings. Correct. Correct. Thank you. And then here's the map with the country, with South Sudan all in red. Just over half the population insufficient food consumption. 6.8 million out of 11. Yemen is, I think, one of the countries that has been most affected by the stoppage of grain because they received so much from the Ukraine. Prices are now seven times higher than they were in 2015. And this is an incredibly poor country already struggling. One child dies every 10 minutes from preventable causes, including hunger. The largest emergency response in the world by the World Food Program has been in Yemen. And they've done a lot of work with rebel-held areas to try and deliver food. The armed conflict has gone on for more than seven years and it is one of the worst humanitarian crises that we are experiencing. Saudi Arabia has led a military coalition that has blockaded a lot of the ports and we have had about four million people displaced from their homes. And so Yemen really is dire in every aspect. 17 to 19 million people are food insecure, 23.4 million in need of humanitarian assistance. And 538,000 people are severely malnourished. I will say, you know, the World Food Program, they have their own shipping unit, mobile cranes that they can use in ports, and so they supply, they provide supplies for 40% of the Yemeni people each month. So they're really investing as much as possible in here. The rates of malnutrition among women and children are the highest in the world and 3.5 million women and children need treatment for severe malnutrition. 2.2 million children under the age of five are at risk of malnutrition. 50,000 children do not receive enough food each day and then 1.3 million pregnant or breastfeeding women are also at risk for acute malnutrition. And so you're really seeing the developmental issues start at a young age and continuing on. And then here's your hunger map for Yemen. About 15.2 million people with insufficient food consumption out of a population of 30 million. There are 20 hunger hotspots that the UN has identified. I pulled a few of the areas of concern with Afghanistan, Central African Republic, DRC, Haiti, Honduras, Sudan, and Syria. And these are areas where the UN is concerned about the conflict, the economics, and the natural disasters putting even more lives at risk. And with Afghanistan, a lot of this has worsened since the fall of government and Taliban taking over. You have a lot of the funding for development that was frozen once the Taliban took control. Humanitarian crisis worsened. 6 million of the country's 39 million people are at risk of famine. It's a huge percentage in the country now. 1 million kids face malnutrition and death if they don't get proper treatment. And it's even worse for girls. And so there's a lot of gender discrimination. Girls not being allowed to go to school. Low priority for being fed essentially. Forced marriages, dowries, and a lot of traditions that really put girls at a distinct disadvantage. There's also increasing high rates of food insecurity globally, not just limited to those countries. And the risks for children really can get compounded in a lot of ways where it could be developmental. They're not receiving enough nutrition to develop, but also for their education. Because as more families are in poverty, the kids are often pulled out of school and sent to work. Harmful in terms of some of the physical labor that they may be doing. And then also if they're sold as child brides because the family needs income or it's a cultural tradition, that is also going to cause issues there too. Some of them will send out to beg for the family and may only eat once a day. And then for women, it is also very dangerous. There are a lot of barriers to work, gender-based violence, forced labor, early marriage, pregnancy complications. Famine and a lack of nutrition and access to food increases the risk across the board. And it's already very high, particularly in some developing countries. And then lastly with refugees. I mentioned these a little bit earlier when we're looking at Kenya. The UN High Commission on Refugees is the UN agency that largely deals with refugees. They do some food security work, so they'll help with refugee camps and some of the child malnutrition areas. But the really big one in the World Food Program, in the UN system, is the World Food Program. And these are just a couple of other programs. I won't go into too much depth on these. But the World Food Program is one of the largest UN agencies. They help 87 million people around the world in about 83 countries. And they actually got the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. They have 5600 trucks, 20 ships, and 92 planes to help deliver food assistance. And so really an incredible outreach on a global scale. And they also help with nutrition programs for mothers and children. And they've fed 16 million children in 60 different countries. So we can take a little happy turn as we start getting into some of the efforts that groups like this can do. This HELP plan focuses on turning crops into other grazing lands. So there's big barren fields into crop land that can be used in a region that's really benefitted. This program has benefited 2.5 million people and helped a lot with climate resiliency issues. The R4 program protects 360,000 farming and pastoral families from climate hazards. And they work in 14 different countries. And then just a kind of general coordination with governments and the World Food Program does a lot with the dangers of being an aid worker and trying to keep them safer in these areas. OCHA is another really good one. They have our early warning systems. And so trying to make sure the World Food Program has the best information in a timely manner. And then that resiliency aspect that we talked about. This is the food insecurity chart that the FAO uses. They're another organization in the UN. They primarily focus on one of the sustainable development goals dealing with hunger. And so you can see the green is food security and as it gets closer to the red it moves to severe food insecurity. So just kind of another way that they conceptualize what it means to have stable nutritious food versus kind of what it doesn't. And so where do we need? Like what are the next steps of the global level? We need better early warning systems and early intervention so that we don't get to the stage five in a lot of these countries. Cash is really important. That when people give cash in the countries they can then use that money in their own communities. And so it helps the community functioning better and it can be a better long-term development if those businesses are able to stay open with cash assistance. But it can't be a long-term solution but it's a good way to kind of meet some of those immediate needs and particularly for countries that don't have social safety nets. That cash assistance that groups provide can make a big difference. RUTFs, if any of you have served in the military this is probably sounding kind of familiar for you there. Slightly different name with the U.S. military but it's basically ready to use food so you can pack up meal packs and put it on some hot water and you have a nutritious soup. And I'll talk about some organizations later. I have not actually tried any of these. I did help pack them which I will get to in a second. The military ones, unless you're Gordon Ramsay I don't think that they taste great. They had a challenge with them but I'll defer to our military veterans for expertise on that one. Most of these RUTFs are made from powdered milk, peanuts, butter, vegetable oil, sugar and a mix of vitamins and minerals so they can be really good packets to distribute quickly. They can make a big difference. We need changes to our international humanitarian law. Using food or hunger as a weapon needs to be considered a war crime. It currently is not. But as we're seeing with a lot of these conflicts hunger is being weaponized and so I strongly agree with the scholars that make that argument. We need more UN Security Council resolutions. Security Council resolution 2417 condemned starving of civilians as a method of warfare and we need more actions like that to really make it clear that it's not acceptable to starve civilians. And then we need better conflict analysis. This can be more negotiations recognizing the impact of climate change on these food issues and trying to not just deliver the food but take a much more holistic approach to that. World Food Program is a really good program called Zero Hunger that talks about some of the different solutions. So we mentioned these a little bit earlier with breaking the conflict, poverty issues, connecting the rural farmers better, reducing food waste and then as a light solution if you go online and you Google the game Free Rice it will ask you different food related trivia and they donate 10 grains of rice for every question you answer correctly. So if you just want a little mood booster click some trivia questions donate some rice and it can be the simple things that really make a difference on that. So what can we do as global citizens? Support groups like the World Food Program promoting a planetary healthy diet eating less meat is one way because meat production especially industrial does lead to a lot of deforestation. It's not the only way also increasing consumption of fruit and vegetables growing what you can at home all of those steps really can add up. Eliminating our food waste 40% of food produced worldwide is wasted and ends up in landfills and so whether it's composting or distribution refrigeration technology all of those steps really can add up to the waste. Climate Smart Agriculture global food system is contributing 31% to global greenhouse gas emissions. So that climate change issue comes back we can have better food systems we can have a direct impact on climate change. Helping everyone afford nutritious diets which kind of relates to the last one of the universal school meals. 73 million students lack reliable access to school meals and so those really do make a big difference. And then the last one I promise are a few organizations that are reputable that if you want to support I certainly encourage you to do so. Feed My Starving Children is a Christian based organization they're the ones that I've packed meals for it's a very, it's a blast and you see all ages of people helping out with it you set up an assembly line like you scoop stuff in and they tell you exactly how much goes in pack it up send it out and so they're a really neat one. World Central Kitchen is the Jose Andreas one they respond all over the world usually within hours of a disaster and so when we had floods in Tennessee you know with the hurricanes we've had they're there they're also on the border of Poland and Ukraine. So they're really an incredible group they have served so in 2022 was they were in over 30 countries and just in Turkey alone 12 million people were helped after the disaster there. Care International is our Kiva one of my personal favorites they it's a micro-credit thing so you can pick an individual and give them money for a project and then it's a it's a lending system so the money they pay it off over time and then you can either withdraw your money or re-lend it to another individual and they partner with banks for people who couldn't get traditional loans and so I like to tell my students this one because if you're really overwhelmed with these issues you know my first loan was to this woman named Imelda in the Philippines and I still remember her face I still remember her story and my $25 helped her buy a fishing net which helped her feed her family and so I think sometimes these problems just seem too big to really take a step back and make a difference and so these are all programs that do that really well. Care is focusing on emergencies particularly fishers, small-scale farmers and pastoral economies and then one acre fund is an NGO that works to end hunger primarily in Kenya, Tanzania Rwanda, Burundi and Malawi and so they will help at this point they've helped farmers increase their profits by 40% per year for the ones that have participated in this program and I do a lot of really cool agricultural training in that kind of work I know it breeze through the last ones kind of quick I'm happy to answer any additional questions and a little bit longer than I hope but not too bad. For that world hunger map how do you get their information? You know they a lot of the data is going to be coming I think I'm fine with some details on this one they work in 94 different countries and so the world food program is gathering data a lot of it can be from staff some can be reported from the countries but they'll also use other information from the UN system so like the UN Environmental Program and the World Monetary and Meteorological Association is doing a lot of climate tracking so they're sort of our NOAA equivalent if they know there's going to be a huge typhoon coming into an area they can look at and prepare in advance for how that area might what food supplies they might need so they're gathering data from a lot of different sources they're also going to add in economic data from other parts of the UN I've not done a deep dive into all of the sources but the bulk of it is going to be data generated from within the UN what was the name of the organization you said had their own food trucks and they had their own cranes to go into harbors and World Food Program where do they get their food that's a good question I think some of it is I mean if it was available locally that's certainly going to be a priority it's going to be very conflict dependent and time dependent so if you have to donate and get a lot of money from a certain country that's close by and it's a very time sensitive situation then you're probably going to prioritize a country that's closer but that's a really good question I've never really looked into all of the supplies do they have warehouses I'm not sure on that yeah that's a good question on that second money and then they would pay back over time it's the third from the bottom I think my personal goal I want to donate to every country that they partner with and they put a few on hold right now so I'm like five countries short I think I met like 69 or 68 countries that I've supported over many years of teaching and working with students and that kind of thing I've only had a couple that have defaulted so I almost always get repaid it's very very rare that you see a default so I absolutely love them I just wanted to say that feeding my starving children is done here in Sheboygan oh great at First United Lutheran Church I think doing again this year and I believe last year I don't remember how many packets we got done but like 5,000 something like that yeah it's awesome if you go to feed my starving children's website you can put in your zip code and find out where the next packing dates are going to be so if you don't hear it locally from an organization you can also try and get your organization to be a site so if it's something that your church or your community organization wants to do you can reach out with them and they do a lot of publicity for you like I said I was not I wanted to do it to help and make a very tangible difference I was not expecting to have nearly as much fun and I think what makes it sound like a really soft hallmark commercial to see some of the little kids that wanted to be part of that and to see the parents explain you know here's why we're doing this here's the difference like your little scoop of corn is going to help these kids that you will never know you may never see or hear about but I think it was just such a good way again for kids to make a difference and not see everything that's so scary and depressing all the time because they're hearing a lot more I think now with social media and technology and to give them an opportunity to be involved in a really good thing is I think helpful and like I said genuinely fun mm-hmm well the idea of that is to make the enemies suffer and break the conflict to it earlier and easier or faster climax and what kind of trying to sell lets stop using food as a weapon mm-hmm just because economically there's so many indicators that say global or total war is better than of extended civil conflict you're not going to argue about that I think with some of the areas where I think I do see some potential like there are now global conventions and agreements on to war crime to target civilians you can engage in war you can engage in military targets but that's one of many reasons why the Russian conflict has been so controversial is that they're targeting schools they're targeting hospitals they're targeting targets that were previously considered off limits and so I think the hope with the famine argument or hunger argument is to make it more similar to the civilian protection arguments or not attacking diplomats or that kind of thing but yeah I think it is definitely going to be a very hard sell very commonly used and the effectiveness I think is a little more debatable on how helpful that is because conflicts like Somalia have gone on for so long and the starving is not working it's not it's a teacher well that's what Russia is hoping with ending this agreement in the Black Sea is they're hoping that it will continue to weaken Ukrainian resolve and it will weaken supporting countries that are now affected by not getting the grain that's exactly what Russia is hoping for some good friends that are Ukrainian so it's been particularly tough year and two of my students that I know are actually Russian were studying in the US at the time the conflict started and I will say from a teaching standpoint to see how other American students responded to these Russian students was a really eye-opening conversation because these are two kids who were scared for their families back in Russia unable to reach them and I think it humanized what some of the Russian people are dealing with and we haven't heard as much of that side it's not easy in Russia right now and I definitely teared up when some of the Russian exchange students at my undergrad had to go back they said this year the past year changed them and I think really inspired them to take actions in Russia when they get back but I think it made a lot me certainly but also a lot of other American students realize the privilege that we have in the things we don't have to think about so I feel for the civilians that are being affected by conflict they didn't choose at all Any other questions? If I know you're going to be quiet I had to slow down on those last couple slides Well thank you very much Thank you