DUBAI: About 400,000 children under the age of five are in danger of dying of acute malnutrition in war-torn and impoverished Yemen this year, UN agencies warned on Friday.
They said half of those in the most vulnerable age bracket, or 2.3 million small children, are projected to suffer from severe malnutrition.
“These numbers are yet another cry for help from Yemen where each malnourished child also means a family struggling to survive,” World Food Programme chief David Beasley said in a joint statement.
The number of Yemeni children in danger of death from lack of food has risen to 400,000, an increase of 22 per cent over 2020.
“More children will die with every day that passes without action,” said Henrietta Fore, head of the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF.
“Humanitarian organisations need urgent predictable resources and unhindered access to communities on the ground to be able to save lives.”
The UN agencies warned that about 1.2 million pregnant or breastfeeding women are also expected to suffer from extreme malnutrition in 2021.
“The crisis in Yemen is a toxic mix of conflict, economic collapse and a severe shortage of funding to provide the life-saving help that’s desperately needed,” said Beasley.
“But there is a solution to hunger, and that’s food and an end to the violence.”
Yemen is engulfed in a bloody power struggle that erupted in 2014 between its government, supported by Saudi Arabia, and Ansar Allah fighters, who control the capital Sanaa and most of the north.
Today, millions of Yemenis are on the brink of famine with the economy destroyed, schools and hospitals barely functioning, and tens of thousands killed.
According to the United Nations, more than three million people have been displaced and close to 80 per cent of the 29-million population is in need of some form of aid for survival.
In 2020, it said it received only $1.43 billion of the $3.2 billion needed to fund aid projects in Yemen.
“Yemen remains the largest humanitarian crisis in the world and one worry is there is a bit of fatigue now,” Luca Russo, senior food crises analyst at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, told reporters in Geneva.
“Public attention is coming down, and this is very risky,” he said, warning that the suffering would only ease when the fighting ends.
“Unless it is stopped or reduced, we don’t see a major way out of this situation.” — AFP
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