Rome: Pope Leo XIV on Thursday slammed the world's failure to stop millions of people going hungry, blaming a "soulless economy" and calling on people to rethink their lifestyles and priorities.

"Allowing millions of human beings to live -- and die -- victims of hunger is a collective failure, an ethical aberration, a historical sin", Leo said in a speech at the Rome-based UN agricultural agency.

"The scourge of hunger... continues to atrociously plague a significant portion of humanity," he said, a day after the UN warned global hunger "is at record levels".

The crisis was "a clear sign of a prevailing insensitivity, a soulless economy," Leo told the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) at an event to mark its 80th anniversary.

Leo highlighted the "outrageous paradoxes" by which enormous amounts of food go wasted in the world "while multitudes of people scramble to find something in the garbage to put in their mouths".

"How can we explain the inequalities that allow a few to have everything and many to have nothing?" he asked.

He cited in particular "Ukraine, Gaza, Haiti, Afghanistan, Mali, the Central African Republic, Yemen, and South Sudan," among other countries "where poverty has become the daily bread".

He also lambasted the fact that people seem "to have forgotten" that using starvation as a weapon is a war crime.

The US pontiff urged the world to rouse itself from "the fatal lethargy in which we are immersed".

"The hungry faces of so many people who still suffer challenge us and invite us to reexamine our lifestyles, our priorities, and our way of living in today's world in general," he said.

The World Food Agency (WFP) said Wednesday that 319 million people are facing acute food insecurity, including 44 million in emergency levels of hunger, and "staggering" cuts to its funding mean it has had to drastically cut aid packages to millions in need.

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