Famine: what is it, where will it strike and how should the world respond?

A mother with her two-year-old girl, Marian, at a Save the Children clinic in Bay, Somalia, where 87% of infants are expected to be malnourished this year. Photograph: Gary Calton/the Observer

The world is in the grip of an unprecedented hunger crisis. A toxic combination of climate crisis, conflict and Covid had already placed some of the poorest countries under enormous strain, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent grain and fuel prices soaring.

“We thought it couldn’t get any worse,” said David Beasley, director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), in June. “But this war has been devastating.”