Sanaa (AFP)

Malnutrition in warring Yemen has reached record highs, approaching famine, the World Food Program (WFP) warned on Thursday as the coronavirus pandemic and lack of funds threaten to worsen the disease even further. humanitarian crisis.

The number of people facing the second highest level of food insecurity in Yemen is expected to rise from 3.6 million people to 5 million in the first half of 2021, WFP has warned.

The UN had already deplored in March 2017, three years after the start of the conflict, that the war had generated in this very poor country of the Arabian Peninsula the worst humanitarian crisis currently in the world, marked in particular by famine and epidemics.

"Conditions close to famine have appeared for the first time in two years," WFP noted Thursday in a statement.

"The number of people experiencing this level of catastrophic food insecurity could triple (...) and reach 47,000 people between January and June 2021".

WFP Executive Director David Beasley said "Yemen was on the verge of famine", calling for "not to turn your back on the millions of families who are desperately in need".

In Yemen, where hospitals have welcomed many weakened and skeletal children in recent years, families are reluctant to hospitalize their little ones because they now fear that they will catch the coronavirus.

As a result of the conflict, more than 24 million people - almost 80% of the population - depend on some form of humanitarian assistance and the situation deteriorated sharply in 2020.

But only 1.43 billion dollars (1.21 billion euros) of the 3.2 billion necessary to finance assistance programs in Yemen had been paid in mid-October, according to the UN.

The UN announced in September that essential aid had been cut in 300 health centers and that more than a third of its main humanitarian programs had been cut or completely halted.

Several donors, including Saudi Arabia which intervenes militarily in Yemen to support the government against the Houthi rebels, have not kept their aid promises, a UN official at the Security Council said at the time.

“Keeping people alive by maintaining the flow of food is imperative, but this cycle cannot last forever,” said the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Qu Dongyu.

"Yemen needs an end to the conflict, the main driver of food insecurity in the country."

burs-gw / feb / hj

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