The WFP has been forced to halve the amount of food it distributes to millions of people in Yemen, Chad, and Niger due to rising food and fuel costs, as well as budget cuts in some traditional donor countries.

“Don’t make us take food from children that are hungry to give to children that are starving,” pleads the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

In December 2021, the UN issued a record $41 billion (£31 billion) appeal to assist 273 million people this year.

As aid workers emphasize, these are not people who will benefit from the UN’s assistance. They are individuals, particularly children, who will almost certainly perish without it.

However, that appeal was made prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both countries previously sold grain to the World Food Programme.

Ukraine was a supplier at the time, not a country in need of humanitarian assistance, as WFP Geneva director Annalisa Conte emphasizes.

The WFP reached a million people inside Ukraine in the first month of the war. However, its supply of Ukrainian grain, which was destined to feed some of the world’s poorest people, has run out.

Meanwhile, many African countries import grain from Ukraine, despite the fact that they are not reliant on UN assistance.

Somalia imports over 60% of grain from Ukraine and Russia, while Eritrea imports nearly 97% of wheat from Ukraine.

They must now compete for food on the international market against Europeans and North Americans.

Jan Egeland, a former UN emergency relief official who is now with the Norwegian Refugee Council, calls this a “catastrophe” for the world’s poorest people. “They will starve,” he says.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that Afghans were “selling their children, and their body parts, in order to feed their families”. However, the UN’s flash appeal for Afghanistan raised approximately half of the funds requested.

A comparable appeal for Yemen, which the UN describes as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, garnered less than a third of the response.

For the latest International News Follow BOL News on Google News. Read more on Latest International News on oldsite.bolnews.com