British Independent newspaper The Independent published a special report on hunger in Yemen , in which it said that 2020 will be the worst year of hunger in the country due to the civil war and raids of the Saudi-UAE coalition, the Corona pandemic, floods and the Desert Locust wave.
The newspaper pointed out in its report written by Bill Trouw that more than half of the population of Yemen, and before the arrival of the Corona epidemic, they were relying on food aid that comes from abroad, and now the number of these will reach a new record.
More children to the brink of starvation
The report stated that the United Nations fears that an estimated 2.4 million children in Yemen will be pushed to the brink of famine by the end of the year, due to the conflict and the unprecedented lack of humanitarian aid during the epidemic.
Vanessa Roy, of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, was quoted as saying that 2020 will be the worst in terms of the total population expected to need food assistance.
The United Nations sounded the alarm this week for another possible famine. Speaking to the Security Council on Tuesday, United Nations Director of Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock said that without more funding and an immediate ceasefire, there would be an increase in hunger, malnutrition, cholera, coronaviruses and "above all death".
Close vital international programs
Lockoc added that, despite the fact that the country was on the verge of collapse, the United Nations was only able to raise 18% of the funds needed to run its programs this year after the failure of the financing campaign.
The Independent said the United Nations has already had to close vital programs, including those that treat malnourished children.
A few days before Lockook's statement, several UN agencies said that an additional 1.2 million people in southern Yemen would suffer from severe food insecurity by the end of the year.
A perfect storm
The Independent report indicated that the joint report of these agencies describes how Yemen is in the eye of a "perfect storm" of economic shocks, conflicts, floods, the Desert Locust epidemic, and now the Corona epidemic.
"We are witnessing a very disturbing deterioration and we are not seeing anything that would allow us to stop this current deterioration," Annabel Simington, a spokeswoman for the United Nations World Food Program, told the newspaper.
More Oxfam says more people in Yemen will die this year due to the hunger associated with the Corona epidemic than will die from the disease itself.
High food prices are one of the main causes of hunger in Yemen. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told The Independent that the cost of basic foodstuffs, such as flour, has increased by 40% since last year, while the cost of food has generally tripled since the war began.
This is partly due to the sharp decline in food and aid coming to Yemen, a country dependent on imports by 90%.
Destruction of the agricultural sector
There are other factors that build up pressure on families, such as the destruction of the agricultural sector, which employs half the workforce in the country, and is responsible for 15% of GDP.
The Food and Agriculture Organization predicted last week that cereal production this year would be only 365,000 metric tons, less than half of pre-war levels.
The crops most affected are the country's palm trees. According to public reports and local journalists investigating this case, more than half of the 4 million palm trees in the country have been wiped out since the beginning of the war.
Weim Zwillingenberg, who has prepared a report on agricultural products, says the secondary impact of the conflict appears on food security, and palm trees are only one aspect. There has been a loss of agricultural yields throughout Yemen over the past five years.
The Yemen Data Project, which tracks air strikes in the country, indicated that since the beginning of the war there have been more than 680 air strikes launched by the Saudi-Emirati coalition on agricultural lands across the country, killing and wounding nearly 400 civilians, and disrupting production Agricultural.