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People in four food insecurity “hotspots” within Burkina Faso, northeastern Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen need urgent help to avoid famine, UN humanitarians said on Friday.
“We are concerned that they may be facing a heightened risk of famine if the situation deteriorates further in the coming months,” said Claudia Ah Poe, Senior Food Security Advisor for the World Food Program (WFP), speaking at a press conference. at UN Geneva.
In a joint alert with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), WFP also warned that another 16 countries also face a “major (food) emergency, or series of emergencies” in the next three years. six months.
Drivers of these humanitarian crises include long-standing conflicts and lack of humanitarian access to communities in need; Climate extremes and the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, they said in a new report on hotspots of food insecurity.
Nations at risk
Nations at risk include Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 22 million people are acutely food insecure, the highest number ever recorded for a single country: Ethiopia, Haiti and Venezuela.
“These countries already had significant levels of acute food insecurity in 2020 … and now face the risk of further rapid deterioration in the coming months,” said Ah Poe of WFP.
Sahel shocks
Underlining the level of need in the three African countries that are among the four most at risk of famine, WFP spokesman Tomson Phiri highlighted how the dire situation of the population was linked to an insurgency in northern Burkina Faso. and northeastern Nigeria.
Years of conflict have also created chronic vulnerability in South Sudan, exacerbated by catastrophic floods this year, Phiri added. “People have lost assets, people have lost their ability to cope with any impact. We had … unprecedented floods this year; the floods were submerging entire villages, people were fighting, the harvest was about to arrive ”.
Pandemic aftermath
Other data from March to September have also shown that, while restrictions related to COVID-19 were progressively lifted in many countries, allowing economic activity to resume, food insecurity has worsened in 27 countries, with as many as 104 , 6 million people in need.
In 2019, the number of people facing similar levels of food insecurity in these 27 countries was 97.6 million, according to WFP.
“In those 27 countries, the number of people already facing acute food insecurity is (sic) more than 100 million. Obviously, the analysis is ongoing continuously, so we expect this number to increase much more, ”said Ah Poe from WFP. “And earlier this year, … we had estimated that in the countries in which we operate, which are about 80 countries, 121 million more people would be at risk of becoming food insecure.”
Lessons from Somalia
Speaking via video link from Rome, FAO’s senior food crisis analyst Luca Russo recalled that the main objective of the alert was to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe by identifying the many factors that contribute to famine and what specific actions they would help vulnerable communities more.
In 2011, famine was declared in southern Somalia in July, but most of the people had already died by May, he said.
“By the time you declare a famine it is too late to act, in the sense that we saw it in the past, with Somalia when the famine was declared, 260,000 people had already died… so we want to give an early warning before the famine occurs “.
Echoing that message, FAO Emergency and Resilience Director Dominique Burgeon called for urgent action from the international community.
“We are deeply concerned about the combined impact of various crises that are eroding people’s ability to produce and access food, leaving them increasingly at risk of the most extreme hunger,” he said. “We need access to these populations to ensure that they have food and the means to produce food and improve their livelihoods to avoid the worst case scenario.”
Risk of famine ‘in the four parts of the world’
WFP Emergency Director Margot van der Velden also warned that the world is at a “catastrophic tipping point”, with the risk of famine in four different parts of the world at the same time. “When we declare a famine, it means that many lives have already been lost. If we wait to find out for sure, people are already dead, ”he said.
Famine is defined as the most severe type of hunger, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (CIF) measure, which humanitarian workers use to measure levels of food security on a scale of one to five.
A declaration of famine – CPI 5 – only refers to areas where “at least one in five households is or is more likely to have extreme food deprivation”, as defined by the CPI, and where “significant mortality, directly attributable to hunger or the interaction of malnutrition and disease, is occurring or will occur ”.
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