COVID-19 which worsens food insecurity, resulting in displacement

People in four food insecurity “hotspots” in Burkina Faso, northeastern Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen, urgently need help to avoid falling into famine, UN humanitarians said Friday.

“We are concerned that they may face a high risk of famine if the situation worsens further in the coming months,” said Claudia Ah Poe, senior food security consultant at the World Food Program (WFP), speaking at a press conference at the UN. Geneva.

In a joint alert with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), WFP also warned that another 16 countries will also face a “major (food) emergency – or a series of emergencies” in the next three. -six months.

Drivers of these humanitarian crises include long-lasting conflicts and a lack of humanitarian access to communities in need; the climatic extremes and economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, said in a new report on food insecurity hot spots.

Nations at risk

Countries at risk include Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo – where 22 million people suffer from severe food insecurity, the highest number ever recorded for a single country – Ethiopia, Haiti and Venezuela.

“These countries already had significant acute levels of food insecurity in 2020 … and are now facing the risk of further rapid deterioration in the coming months,” said Ah Poe of WFP.
Sahel shock

Highlighting the level of need in the three African countries considered to be among the four most at risk of famine, WFP spokesperson Tomson Phiri stressed how the dire situation of the people is linked to an insurrection in northern Burkina Faso and in the north-east of Nigeria.

Years of conflict have also created chronic vulnerability in South Sudan, exacerbated by this year’s catastrophic floods, Phiri added. “People have lost goods, people have lost the ability to cope with any shocks. We’ve had … unprecedented floods this year; floodwaters were submerging entire cities, people were fighting, the harvest was about to arrive. ”

Pandemic relapse

Further data from March to September also showed that while COVID-19 restrictions were progressively lifted in many countries, allowing economic activity to resume, food insecurity worsened in 27 countries, with a high of 104. 6 million people in need.

In 2019, the number of people facing similar levels of food insecurity in these 27 countries was 97.6 million, according to WFP.

“In those 27 countries, the number of people who are already facing acute food insecurity are already (sic) more than 100 million. The analysis is obviously ongoing, so we exclude this number to increase much more, “said Ah Poe from WFP.” And earlier this year, we … had estimated in the countries where we operate – around 80 countries – an additional 121 million people would be at risk of falling into food insecurity. “

Somalia lessons

Speaking via video link from Rome, Luca Russo, FAO senior analyst on food crises, recalled that the main objective of the alert was to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe by identifying the many factors contributing to the famine and which specific actions would help vulnerable communities the most. .

In 2011, famine was declared in southern Somalia in July, but most of the people had already died by May, he said.

“By the time you declare a famine it is already too late to act, in the sense that we have seen it in the past, with Somalia when the famine was declared, 260,000 people had already died … so we want to launch an early warning before the famine occurs. “

Echoing that message, FAO Director of Emergencies and Resilience, Dominique Burgeon, called for urgent action from the international community.

“We are deeply concerned about the combined impact of several crises that are eroding people’s ability to produce and access food, leaving them increasingly at risk of the most extreme hunger,” he said. “We need access to these populations to ensure they have food and the means to produce food and improve their livelihoods to prevent a worst case scenario.”

Risk of famine “in all four parts of the world”

WFP Emergency Director Margot van der Velden also warned that the world is at a “catastrophic tipping point”, with the risk of famine in four different parts of the world simultaneously. “When we declare a famine, it means that many lives have already been lost. If we wait to find out for sure, people are already dead, “he said.

Famine is defined as the most severe type of hunger, as measured by the Integrated Food Security Phase (IPC) classification, which humanitarians use to measure food security levels on a scale of one to five.

A famine statement – IPC 5 – refers only to areas where “at least one in five households are or are most likely to have extreme food deprivation”, as defined by the IPC, and where “significant mortality, directly attributable to hunger or the interaction between malnutrition and disease, is happening or will happen ”.

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