About 20 million Yemenis are food insecure, UN agencies said on Saturday, adding the conflict ravaging the nation was the key driver behind rising hunger levels.
“As many as 20 million Yemenis are food insecure in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” a joint statement by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP) said.
“Already 15.9 million people wake up hungry” in Yemen, it said, citing an analysis by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a food security survey.
According to the IPC — whose analysis is necessary to decide whether to declare famine in countries — the 20 million facing “severe acute food insecurity” represent 67 percent of Yemen’s population.
“What the IPC tells us is alarming,” UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen Lise Grande said.
WFP executive director David Beasley said the analysis “is an alarm bell that shows hunger is rising.”
“We need a massive increase in aid and sustained access to all areas in Yemen in order to rescue millions of Yemenis. If we don’t, we will lose an entire generation of children to hunger,” he said.
Spokesman Herve Verhoosel said the WFP aims to scale up its support program in Yemen from the current level of 7 million to 8 million people to reach 10 million by the end of this month and 12 million by end of next month.
“WFP has enough food stocks in country for now, but will need US$152 million a month to sustain its scale-up into next year,” he said.
“A large proportion of the population, even in more stable areas, cannot access basic food commodities because food prices have jumped by 150 percent compared to pre-crisis levels,” the statement by the three agencies said.
The report came as Yemeni government representatives and a rebel delegation were holding UN-brokered peace talks in Sweden.
In related news, the US wants to continue support to the Saudi-led coalition in the Yemeni conflict and is going to remain engaged in efforts to combat Iranian influence and Muslim militancy in Yemen, US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Arabian Gulf Affairs Timothy Lenderking said yesterday.
“There are pressures in our system ... to either withdraw from the conflict or discontinue our support of the coalition, which we are strongly opposed to on the administration side,” he told a security forum in the United Arab Emirates.
“We do believe that the support for the coalition is necessary. It sends a wrong message if we discontinue our support,” Lenderking said.
The peace talks launched last week were a “vital first step” in ending the conflict, he said.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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