Aid for famine-struck Yemenis
UN rushes food to district where people were living off leaves
CAIRO: The United Nations and individual donors are rushing food to a desperate corner of northern Yemen where starving villagers were found to be living off leaves. Aid officials are searching for ways to ensure aid reaches those in need amid alarm that the country’s hunger crisis is worsening beyond the relief effort’s already strained capabilities.
The aid push was directed at a district called Aslam where earlier this month it was found some families eating leaves. But in a sign of the difficulties in tracking Yemen’s near-famine, conditions appeared to be as bad or worse in a neighbouring district, Khayran al-Maharraq.
On a recent day, Shouib Sakaf buried his three-year-old daughter Zaifa, the fifth child known to have died in the district this year from malnutrition-related illness. Sakaf prayed over a grave marked by piles of stones and tangled, dry branches from the surrounding mountain shrubs.
Zaifa was as old as Yemen’s civil war, waged between rebels known as Houthis and a coalition led by Saudi Arabia.
Born in the war’s early days, Zaifa succumbed to the humanitarian crisis it has caused – widespread hunger, the collapse of the economy and the breakdown of the health system.
In her final weeks, she wasted away, her ribs protruding, her face and feet swollen. At a local medical facility which did not have enough supplies, her father was told she had to be taken to a hospital further away to treat kidney complications.
He had no way to pay for transportation there.
“Death came at 2.30pm,” Sakaf said with a deep sigh. “Then we left.”
UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock issued a dire warning to the Security Council on Friday, ahead of the world body’s General Assembly, saying, “We are losing the fight against famine” in Yemen.
“We may now be approaching a tipping point, beyond which it will be impossible to prevent massive loss of life as a result of widespread famine across the country,” he said.
“We are already seeing pockets of famine-like conditions, including cases where people are eating leaves.”
Across Yemen, around 2.9 million women and children are acutely malnourished; another 400,000 children are fighting for their lives, in the same condition as Zaifa was.
This year, the UN and humanitarian groups provided assistance to more than eight million of the most vulnerable Yemenis who don’t know when their next meal will come.
That is a dramatic expansion from 2017, when food was reaching three million people a month in the country of nearly 29 million.