Thursday October 25, 2018
"There is now a clear and present danger of an imminent and great big famine engulfing Yemen," UN aid chief Mark Lowcock said.
A nurse attends to a boy infected with diphtheria at the al-Sabeen hospital in Sana'a, Yemen. | Photo: Reuters
The United Nations
aid chief sounded the alarm at the body's Security Council Tuesday that
half the population of war-torn Yemen — some 14 million people — could
soon be on the brink of famine and completely relying on humanitarian
aid for survival.
"There
is now a clear and present danger of an imminent and great big famine
engulfing Yemen: much bigger than anything any professional in this
field has seen during their working lives," U.N. aid chief Mark Lowcock
said.
He described the
scale of what was being faced in Yemen as "shocking" given that only two
famines had been declared in the world in the past 20 years — Somalia
in 2011 and a localized famine in South Sudan last year.
The war in Yemen,
which has been ongoing since 2015, killing or injuring over 60,000
people in a country considered to be the poorest country in the Middle
East. A Saudi-led military coalition backed by the United States along
with other western powers such as the U.K. and France, backing
government forces are fighting a Houthi rebel group, which has taken
control of part of the country.
Lowcock said the
United Nations currently coordinates the delivery of aid to some eight
million people in Yemen and that the humanitarian crisis has been
deepened by an economic crisis and continued fighting around the
country's key Hodeidah port. Yemen traditionally imports 90 percent of
its food.
He appealed for a
humanitarian ceasefire, protection of the supply of food and essential
goods across the country, a larger and faster injection of foreign
exchange into the economy through the central bank, increased
humanitarian funding and support, and for the warring parties to engage
in peace talks.
"Beyond the sheer
numbers, while millions of people have been surviving on emergency food
assistance for years, the help they get is enough merely to survive. Not
to thrive. The toll is unbearably high," Lowcock said.
"The
immune systems of millions of people on survival support for years on
end are now literally collapsing, making them – especially children and
the elderly – more likely to succumb to malnutrition, cholera, and other
diseases," he said.