UN warns half of Yemen starving

A UN food agency has warned that nearly half of Yemen’s population is starving and vowing to scale up its aid to the impoverished and war-ravaged Middle East country.

More than 10 million of Yemen’s some 25 million inhabitants are either severely food insecure — meaning they require food assistance because they cannot find enough food for themselves — or teetering on the edge, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) stated on Friday.

The country has one of the world’s highest levels of malnutrition among children, with nearly half of all kids under the age of five — a full two million of them — stunted, WFP spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told reporters.

A million of those kids are acutely malnourished, she said.

Yemen, one of the world’s poorest countries, has been going through a difficult political transition since the long-time US-backed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh was ousted in February 2012 after a year of deadly protests against his 33-year rule.

The country is struggling with endemic poverty, political instability, large-scale displacement of Yemenis and refugee influxes from other countries, civil strife and rife insecurity.

At the same time, Yemen is particularly vulnerable to the global surge of food prices, since it imports up to 90 percent of its main staple foods such as wheat and sugar, Byrs pointed out.

In a bid to try to get the situation under control, WFP is scaling up its food assistance program to Yemen, where it already provided aid to some 839,000 people last month, she said.

Starting in July, the UN agency plans to launch a special two-year “Recovery Operation,” aimed at addressing long-term hunger and helping ensure food stability for some six million people.

Under the program, the UN agency will among other things provide malnutrition prevention and treatment, give 200,000 girls in school take-home rations of food, and will help create rural jobs, improve agriculture and water supplies, Byrs said.

The aid increase will be costly, she said, with the agency estimating the two-year program will cost around $491 million (360 million euros).

So far however, WFP remains $117.5 million short to cover its operations just until the end of this year, Byrs said.