The head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) on Thursday warned that millions of people are closer to starvation because of the deadly combination of conflict, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic and he urged donor nations and billionaires to help feed them and ensure their survival.
Program executive director David Beasley told the UN Security Council that the response to his warning five months ago of a potential “hunger pandemic” had averted famine and kept people alive, but the work was not done.
The program and its partners were going all out to reach as many as 138 million people this year — “the biggest scale-up in our history,” he said.
Photo: Reuters
More was needed to help “the 270 million people marching toward the brink of starvation.”
Already, 30 million rely solely on the program for food to survive and would die without it, Beasley said.
He warned that famine was possible in up to three dozen countries and could overwhelm places already weakened by conflict.
Beasley cited the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where violence has increased and instability already has forced 15.5 million people near starvation.
A lack of funding has forced cutbacks in assistance to feed people in Yemen, which faces the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, he said, adding that in Nigeria and South Sudan, millions more people have become food insecure because of the pandemic.
The WFP needs US$4.9 billion to feed 30 million people who will die without the program’s assistance for a year, he said.
“It’s time for those who have the most to step up, to help those who have the least in this extraordinary time in world history,” Beasley said.
“Worldwide, there are over 2,000 billionaires with a net worth of US$8 trillion,” the former South Carolina governor said, pointing to reports that some of the wealthiest Americans have made “billions upon billions” during the pandemic.
Business Insider reported that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and others all saw their wealth increase by billions since the pandemic began.
“I am not opposed to people making money, but humanity is facing the greatest crisis any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” Beasley said. “It’s time for those who have the most to step up, to help those who have the least in this extraordinary time in world history.”
“There is a grave danger that many more people will die from the broader economic and social consequences of COVID-19 than from the virus itself, especially in Africa, and the last thing we need is to have the cure be worse than the disease itself,” Beasley added.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the