As more go hungry and malnutrition persists, achieving Zero Hunger by 2030 in doubt, UN report warns was recorded by Global Incident Tracker on Monday, 13 July 2020 at 14:00 UTC. The event is classified as a famine / food crisis incident with a severity rating of Severe, and was detected through the World Health Organization (WHO).
Rome – More people are going hungry, an annual study by the United Nations has found. Tens of millions have joined the ranks of the chronically undernourished over the past five years, and countries around the world continue to struggle with multiple forms of malnutrition.The latest edition of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, published today, estimates that almost 690 million people went hungry in 2019 – up by 10 million from 2018, and by nearly 60 million in five years. High costs and low affordability also mean billions cannot eat healthily or nutritiously. The hungry are most numerous in Asia but expanding fastest in Africa. Across the planet, the report forecasts, the COVID-19 pandemic could tip over 130 million more people into chronic hunger by the end of 2020. (Flare-ups of acute hunger in the pandemic context may see this number escalate further
Where this happened
The incident is located in Bangladesh (Asia), whose capital is Dhaka. Historically, Bangladesh is most affected by cyclones, floods, river erosion and building collapses. You can follow every incident recorded in this country, updated live, on the Bangladesh incident tracker.
Approximate coordinates of the reported event are 23.700°, 90.400°. The marker on the map above shows this position; for news-derived reports the location reflects the place named in media coverage and may represent a district or city rather than an exact site.
Understanding famine / food crisis events
Acute, widespread food insecurity and malnutrition emergencies. Famine is classified through the IPC scale and is nearly always the product of conflict, market failure and drought acting together rather than crop failure alone.
How severity is rated
Global Incident Tracker rates every event on a four-step scale — Minor, Moderate, Severe and Extreme — derived from the source signal: earthquake magnitude, official GDACS alert colour, or the volume of independent media reporting for news-derived incidents. This event is currently rated Severe. Ratings can change as more information becomes available, and a rating is a monitoring signal rather than an official government assessment.
Safety guidance for famine / food crisis situations
- Keep a safe distance from the affected area and let emergency services work unobstructed.
- Rely on official local channels for instructions and avoid amplifying unverified reports.
- Prepare a basic emergency kit: water, medication, torch, power bank, documents and cash.
- Follow only official instructions from local authorities and emergency services — this page is a monitoring record, not an emergency alert.
Data and verification
This record was generated automatically from the World Health Organization (WHO) and de-duplicated against our archive. Early reports for any incident can be revised: locations get refined, magnitudes are recalculated and impact figures change as assessments arrive. We deliberately do not publish casualty numbers unless an official source states them. The original source report is linked at the top of this page.
Keep watching the situation on our live world incident map, browse every famines and food crises we track on the Famine / Food Crisis tracker, or see today's global picture on the incidents today page.
Timeline and sources
Officially recorded
An official record exists from World Health Organization. That confirms the event was recorded; figures quoted from news reports are not confirmed by it.
How statuses are decided · the number of reports is never treated as confirmation.
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· received · event time 13 Jul 2020, 14:00 UTCFirst report Humanitarian agency report
First recorded from World Health Organization.
Times are when this site received each report, in UTC; the event time is shown where the source gave one. Copies of one syndicated story count as one report.
Conditions at the time
9.7 mm of rain fell that day, and the temperature peaked at 31°C.
Weather reanalysis for this location and date via Open-Meteo.