The United Nations warns that 265 million people could be pushed to the point of starvation in late 2020 with the first increase in global poverty since 1990 unless urgent action is taken.
Humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock made the biggest appeal in UN history on Thursday, seeking $ 10.3 billion to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic and its deadly second-order effects, especially the global recession and diversion of health resources .
“My message to the G-20 is to step up now or pay the price later. For a relatively modest investment, we can avoid the worst, including exporting the worst problems from the most fragile countries,” Lowcock told reporters, referring to the group of the largest economies in the world.
The UN launched its Global Humanitarian Response Plan in March, but since then it has not met its funding targets, generating $ 1.7 billion so far. The initiative targets 63 countries already facing humanitarian crises in which COVID-19 and the associated closures are beginning to have a profound impact.
“Failing to act now will free the virus to go around the world, undo decades of development and create tragic and exportable problems for a generation,” said Lowcock, who serves as the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.
That staggering number, 265 million people on the brink of hunger, was reached by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and a researcher at Oxford University in the first detailed assessment of its kind.
Lowcock told ABC News that he expects the United States to provide about 30% of that $ 10.3 billion figure. So far, the United States has announced $ 1.5 billion for international assistance, though not all of that has gone to aid groups and international agencies for which Lowcock is raising funds.
Despite the worsening outbreak in the United States, which already leads the world in COVID-19 deaths and cases, Lowcock told ABC News that the United States “remains the indispensable nation.”
“[It’s] only when there is a leadership from the United States and the mobilization of others, is there a truly effective global response, “he said, adding a warning:” No one, including anyone in the United States, will be safe from this virus until everyone is safe from him. ”
But with a shortage of personal protective equipment and insufficient evidence, some have said the United States needs to focus on its own outbreak.
So far, only 0.1% of all US emergency funds have been earmarked for international assistance, but there is now a growing push in Congress to do more.
A bipartisan group of senators wrote to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, DN.Y., urging them to prioritize “a significant US investment in the international response” in the next emergency financing package. In the House, at least 125 members have signed a similar letter to the House leadership, warning: “We cannot afford to outsource global external assistance, as it is an essential component of a COVID-19 response.”
While increased US assistance may help mitigate the effects worldwide, Lowcock said the world’s richest economies were slow to act and “waited too long to handle this.”
In unusually critical tones, Lowcock has called for increased assistance.
“I don’t have a magic money tree,” he told reporters on Thursday, “but donors have and have used it to protect, I think wisely, their own economies and their own countries, and what I’m saying is would be a very good idea. use only 1% of that money for your own interests, as well as an act of empathy and human generosity to protect the poorest countries. “
In particular, the World Food Program warned earlier this week that 10 countries are already facing deep food crises: Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Syria, Sudan, Nigeria and Haiti, totaling 135 million people.
But that could double 265 million people if this urgent appeal is not followed, the agency estimated.
More than 588,000 people have died worldwide from the coronavirus, which has infected 13.6 million people in 216 countries, areas, or territories.
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