Lashed by Covid and soaring prices for food and fuel, a quarter of a billion people face falling into extreme poverty
The UK is sliding into a social and economic crisis, the likes of which its people have not seen for decades. Household fuel bills are on course to top £2,400 by this autumn, while the price of a grocery shop is rocketing. Meanwhile, the economy is flatlining and the average employee’s pay keeps falling behind inflation, which hit 7% in March, the highest rate since 1992. No wonder that the charities and analysts that work on poverty and inequality are issuing such dire warnings. On one projection, one in three Britons – 23.5 million people – will be unable to afford the cost of living this year.
The rest of the world is being buffeted by the same storms: Covid, followed by soaring prices for food and fuel, and then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has led to another massive rise in the cost of basics. The difference is that most other countries do not have our wealth, or social security system, or infrastructure. So imagine the devastation felt elsewhere, in countries less wealthy, less stable and less powerful. In Somalia, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) predicts, more than 6 million people will fall into “crisis, emergency, or catastrophic levels of hunger” within the next two months.
