[ad_1]
It’s Friday morning in Alexandra Township, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, and scores of people gather in a field outside a food distribution point, hoping that Today is the day they get something to eat.
“If you’re hungry, it’s easy to get sick from stress and all that,” says Mduduzi Khumalo, who has been lining up every day for two weeks. To get food, your name must be on the list, and so far, despite registering multiple times, yours hasn’t been.
Khumalo worked as a delivery man before South Africa’s coronavirus blockade decimated his income. Her children used to receive two meals a day at school, but schools are closed now. Every day, the children wait for him in the small family house, and every day he brings the same bad news.
“They know that if I don’t get anything for them, it’s over,” Khumalo tells CBS News.
Famines “of Biblical proportions”
CBS News
The coronavirus pandemic has left the world facing an unprecedented hunger crisis. The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) warned that by the end of the year, more than 260 million people will face hunger, double the figures of last year.
“In the worst case, we could be studying famine in about three dozen countries,” said WFP director David Beasley. He said the world could face multiple famines “of biblical proportions in a few months”.
Oil prices have collapsed, tourism is running out, and remittances abroad (foreign workers who transfer money to their families in other countries), on which many people depend for survival, are expected to decline dramatically.
“There is a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself,” said Beasley.
Sub-Saharan Africa particularly at risk
If world GDP falls 5% due to the pandemic, another 147 million people could be plunged into extreme poverty, according to estimates by the Washington-based International Institute for Food Policy Research.
CBS News
More than half of those people, 79 million, live in sub-Saharan Africa, David Laborde Debucquet, IFPRI principal investigator, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Another 42 million are in South Asia, he said.
“We are talking about (people) earning less than $ 1.90 a day … where basically their lives are in danger because when they are in this kind of poverty and cannot eat, they will die,” Debucquet told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “This will affect the urban poor much more. In the past two decades, we have seen very rapid urbanization in these two regions.”
“I am afraid of getting sick and I am afraid of starvation.”
Thandi Lebho, 39, lives in the South African municipality of Diepsloot. She and her husband and three children have been waiting for food donations for three weeks. They have not been able to get what they need since the South African shutdown began and their income from selling tupperware containers was depleted.
“I have registered online and by phone, and I write in the street papers, and I came here to the clinic and registered, but nothing happened,” he tells CBS News. When he manages to get to the food distribution truck, he is out of supplies.
“The kids are not going to school and education is going down. We are struggling to get money because I am working for myself. I am self-employed, so my business is at home, so I am not earning anything now,” she says. . “I’m starving now. I have nothing.”
He will return to the food line tomorrow, trying to get something to support his family.
“I am afraid of getting sick and I am afraid of starvation,” she says.
