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Mark Lowcock, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that $ 80 million would be divided among Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen, which would receive the largest tranche of $ 30 million. .
Another $ 20 million has been set aside for Ethiopia, where droughts could worsen an already fragile situation.
“The prospect of a return to a world where famines are commonplace would be heartbreaking and obscene in a world where there is more than enough food for everyone,” Lowcock said in a statement.
“Famines result in agonizing and humiliating deaths. They fuel conflict and war. They activate the mass shift. Its impact on a country is devastating and long-lasting. No one should see a slide into famine as an inevitable side effect of this pandemic. If it happens it is because the world has allowed it ”.
Releasing money from the UN Central Emergency Response Fund was the fastest and most efficient way to support famine prevention, with a real risk of famine in parts of Burkina Faso, northeastern Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen, according to the OCHA statement. The famine was last declared in 2017 in parts of South Sudan.
World Food Program (WFP) Executive Director David Beasley said the world was going through turbulent times.
“That is why we must focus more and redouble our efforts to avoid icebergs, icebergs like hunger, starvation, destabilization and migration,” Beasley wrote in a tweet.
In an opinion piece published online by the London-based Times newspaper on Tuesday, Lowcock and Beasley wrote that humanity’s greatest success had been consigning hunger to history.
“But the impacts of the pandemic and associated lockdowns (declining income, rising food prices) coincided with tinder. Let this fire take over and millions of children will die, ”they wrote.
“When the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to WFP, they said they wanted to turn the eyes of the world to the millions of people who suffer from or face the threat of hunger.
“We could not agree more. When more than 250 million people are teetering on the edge of a cliff, this is no time to look the other way, let alone walk away. “
(With contributions from the United Nations)
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