The world is suffering one of its worst post-war food crises.

Before the Hamas attack on October 7, 333 million people in the 78 countries covered by the World Food Programme were suffering what food gurus call “acute levels of food insecurity.”

The WFP’s latest figures do not cover the 26 million North Koreans, half of whom are said to be suffering from malnutrition.

Neither do they include Gaza where 2.2 million people are literally starving to death. Another 129,000 are facing a thin coffin in an early grave in Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, and Sudan.

Feeding these people. Providing them with the means to feed themselves, is not just the right moral thing to do. It is in the interests of the developed world.

The starving millions are driven by the survival instinct to walk, fly, or even sail across the sea in rubber dinghies to countries that don’t want them but can feed them.

The problem is that the situation is likely to become much, much worse, and there is little prospect of getting any better.

The rising food prices which have struck the developed world’s households are also hitting aid agencies budgets, and low growth in the developed world means lower tax revenues and less money for food aid.

The WFP budget last year was $14.1 billion. They will be lucky to raise the same amount this year, and the WFP has several million more mouths to feed.

The problems are further compounded by a shortage of fertiliser caused by the Ukraine War. Three of the biggest fertiliser-producing countries are Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The cost of agricultural fertiliser has rocketed to a ten-year high.

In the first 18 months or so of the Ukraine War the drop in fertiliser volumes had little effect on crop yields because of the time lag caused by the growing season and fertiliser storage capacity.

But the impact will be felt this spring as farmers are unable to spread adequate muck on hungry crops such as soya, rice, maize, soybeans and wheat—the major foodstuffs.

War is the biggest driver of famine. When the fighting starts the farming stops. The ground is churned by tank treads and exploding landmines rather than productively ploughed for arable crops.

There is no end in sight to the fighting in Ukraine. Or for that matter Gaza, Somalia, Mali, Sudan, Burkina Faso…. All those places are guaranteed to continue to generate empty stomachs and desperate immigrants.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain".