Musk, Bezos should end world hunger with one-time payment: UN WFP director

Close to 23 million Afghans face acute hunger come winter, while 5.2 million Ethiopians suffer food insecurity since last year

Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have the means to overcome global hunger in the palm of their hands, says United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director David Beasely.

In an interview with CNN, Beasely said that $6 billion was needed to feed the 42 million people that were suffering from grave food shortages. He opined billionaires like Musk and Bezos, founders of Tesla and Amazon respectively, should step up on a ‘one-time basis’ to eliminate world hunger.

According to Bloomberg, Musk’s net worth as of Wednesday was $287bn, which meant that he would only have to pitch in about two percent of his wealth to ensure no one went foodless in the world. Contrastingly, Bezos’s would only have to give up about three percent of his wealth as his net worth stood at $196bn the same day.

The Covid-19 pandemic coupled with an impending climate catastrophe, said Beasely, would have dire impacts on the global community. He cited Afghanistan’s example and said that close to 23 million people faced acute hunger, of which a burgeoning 3.2 million would be children. As another example, Beasely said that approximately 5.2 million people in Ethiopia faced food insecurity due to an unstable political situation in the Tigray region since last year.

This wasn’t the first time Beasely raised alarm over the situation in Afghanistan. The WFP executive director spoke to Reuters on Monday and said that there was a looming humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, which would only exacerbate, come winter. He said that the millions of international dollars poised as economic development assistance had to be rejigged as humanitarian aid to avoid famine in Afghanistan.

Organizations like WFP, added Beasely, were facing crisis like situations as they were unable to provide food supplies to effected populations due to cash and fuel shortages.

Beasely’s concerns over hunger have also found resonance in a document that came out of US President Joe Biden’s administration on October 20. The ‘Lancet Countdown’ report foreboded that impending drought posed a formidable threat to food production. The report noted that droughts and other natural disasters like floods and hurricanes would fuel global migrations, which could signal trouble for global governments.