these swings in food markets like we've never seen and will almost certainly lead to widespread famine by the end of this year at this point.View on YouTube
Available data show a severe global food crisis in 2022, but not "widespread famine globally" by the end of 2022.
Key points:
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The 2023 Global Report on Food Crises finds that in 2022 about 258 million people in 58 countries faced high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3+), with 376,000 people in IPC Phase 5 “Catastrophe” across seven countries (Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Haiti, Nigeria, Burkina Faso). It explicitly notes that while there were risks of famine in localized parts of Somalia and Yemen in 2022, these famine scenarios did not materialize. (twn.my)
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UN and humanitarian agencies in 2022 repeatedly warned of a “real risk” of multiple famines driven by the Ukraine war, high food prices, conflict and climate shocks, but were describing risk and brink-of-famine conditions, not an actually realized, globally widespread famine. (newstodaynet.com)
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The IPC/UN system’s technical definition of famine (Phase 5) requires extreme thresholds for hunger, child malnutrition and mortality. Contemporary reporting explains that Phase 5 “Catastrophe/Famine” and pre‑famine conditions do not automatically equal an official famine declaration, which remained limited and highly localized, not global, in 2022. (apnews.com)
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Humanitarian action and partial stabilization of grain markets (including the Black Sea Grain Initiative restarting Ukrainian exports in July 2022) helped ease the worst price spikes and avert some of the projected famine outcomes, even though hunger still worsened substantially. (en.wikipedia.org)
In sum, while the Russia–Ukraine war and sanctions/export disruptions clearly deepened a global hunger and food‑price crisis in 2022, the specific prediction that this would “almost certainly lead to widespread famine by the end of this year” did not come true in the sense normally used by UN and IPC assessments. The outcome was extensive acute food insecurity and localized Phase‑5 conditions, not a broadly distributed, officially recognized global famine. Therefore, the prediction is best classified as wrong.