CAIRO (AP) – More than 2 million Yemeni children under the age of 5 are expected to endure acute malnutrition by 2021, four UN organizations said Friday, urging stakeholders to end years of conflict affecting the poorest. country of the Arab world. of famine.
The UN report warned that nearly one in six of those children – 400,000 of the 2.3 million – is at risk of dying from severe acute malnutrition this year, a significant increase from last year’s estimates. The report also said that lack of funds hindered humanitarian programs in Yemen as donor countries have failed to meet their commitments.
In addition to the crisis, approximately 1.2 million pregnant or nursing women in Yemen are expected to be acutely malnourished this year.
“These numbers are yet another cry for help from Yemen, where every malnourished child also means a family struggling to survive,” said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, which co-published the report with the Food and Agriculture Organization UNICEF. and the World Health Organization.
“The crisis in Yemen is a toxic mix of conflict, economic collapse and a serious shortage of funding,” Beasley explains. In 2020, humanitarian programs in Yemen received just $ 1.9 billion of the required $ 3.4 billion, the report said.
UNICEF estimates that nearly all 12 million children in Yemen are in need of some form of assistance. This may include food aid, health services, clean water, education and money subsidies to help the poorest families forage.
“But there is a solution to hunger, and that is food and an end to violence,” Beasley said.
Yemenis have suffered six years of bloodshed, destruction and humanitarian catastrophe. In 2014, Iranian-allied Houthi rebels seized the capital and much of the north of the country. Months later, a Saudi-led coalition launched a sweeping military intervention to restore the UN-backed government. Despite relentless Saudi air strikes and a blockade of Yemen, the war has reached a deadlock.
Last week, President Joe Biden announced that the US will no longer support the Saudi-led coalition. But achieving peace will be a difficult path
Biden also reversed the Trump administration’s designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization. That move was welcomed by aid groups working in Yemen, who feared the designation would disrupt the flow of food, fuel and other goods, leaving Yemenis barely alive.
“Malnourished children are more vulnerable to disease … It is a vicious and often fatal cycle, but many lives can be saved with relatively inexpensive and simple interventions,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.