By Alessandra Cardone
TAORMINA, Italy, May 27 (Xinhua) -- The Group of Seven (G7) countries should take the lead in fighting the current famine threat, and uphold their pledge to eradicate hunger they had made in 2015, humanitarian groups said at the ongoing summit in Italy.
The appeal was launched by a group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which urged the G7 to immediately provide financial resources to tackle the famine that has been declared in parts of South Sudan already, and is threatening northeast Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen.
Promoters of the initiative included Save the Children, Oxfam, ActionAid, Action global health advocacy partnership, and Global Citizen advocacy group.
Their appeal comes as G7 leaders met with their African counterparts from five countries and six organizations, in the second day of the summit taking place in the Sicilian town of Taormina.
G7 and African leaders gathered to discuss the related issues of Europe's migration crisis and economic development in the African continent.
At the G7 summit in Germany in 2015, "The G7 had committed to lifting 500 million people in developing countries out of hunger and malnutrition by 2030," Marie Rumsby, senior advisor for Global Citizen, told reporters in Taormina.
Yet, the number of people living in conditions of severe food insecurity was estimated to have risen by about 40 percent over the last two years, according to the groups.
Furthermore, some 30 million people were currently facing the UN-declared famine alert in the four mentioned African countries.
"None of the G7 has yet confirmed its financial commitment to the target expressed at the 2015 summit, after two years," Rumsby told Xinhua.
Furthermore, no G7 partner would have provided its share of funding for the four African countries at risk.
The UN appealed for some 6.3 billion U.S. dollars for the famine emergency in South Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen, and some 4.9 billion U.S. dollars were urgently needed by July.
"If each G7 government contributed its far share to this appeal... this would raise almost half of the total required," Oxfam said earlier this week.
According to the volunteers in Taormina, the world's seven most industrialized countries have both the power and the duty to act.
"The G7 have the political and economic weight to respond to this current appeal," Giorgia Ceccarelli, agriculture and food-security policy advisor with Oxfam Italy, told Xinhua.
"They also have the political power to detail a long-term investment plan in order to achieve the target they had vowed to reach by 2030," she said.
Besides upholding their commitments on hunger and malnutrition, the NGOs urged the G7 to pay more attention to hunger crisis prevention by supporting more smallholder farmers' resilience.
