The World Bank on Tuesday reported that food prices continued to spike across low, middle, and high-income nations, despite its sustained interventions along with other development partners to boost food production across the global geopolitical zones,
The development finance institution, in its latest Food Security Update report published on Tuesday reflected that food prices remained high worldwide due to rising inflation across the nations.
The report showed that in 63.2% of low-income countries, inflation exceeded 5%, representing a 1.3 percentage point increase from the previous food update published in January last year while 73.9% of lower-middle-income countries and 48% of upper-middle-income countries experienced inflation levels surpassing 5%, with no change from the previous update.
According to the report, in high-income countries, food inflation surpassed 5% in 44.4% of nations, marking a drop of 1.9 percentage points from the previous food update.
Similarly, the report further disclosed that in 71% of the 165 countries with available data, food price inflation outpaced overall inflation in real terms.
It would be recalled that in response to the global food security crisis, the World Bank Group had committed $45 billion, including $22 billion in new lending and $23 billion from existing portfolios
These initiatives, which currently cover 90 countries, were aimed at addressing both short-term needs like expanding social protection and long-term goals such as boosting productivity and implementing climate-smart agriculture.
The Washington D.C- based further projected that its intervention would positively impact 335 million individuals with about 53% of women beneficiaries, representing about 44% of the world’s undernourished population.
Data on the bank’s interventions reflected that one of them, the West Africa Food Systems Resilience Programme, has a budget of $766 million and aims to improve preparedness against food insecurity while enhancing the resilience of food systems in the region.
This is even as the bank is preparing an extra commitment of $345 million for Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo.
