2 million Yemeni children starving

MORE than two million Yemeni children under the age of five are expected to endure acute malnutrition in 2021, four United Nations agencies have said, urging stakeholders to end the years-long conflict that has brought the Arab world’s poorest country to the brink of famine.

The UN report warned that nearly one in six of those children - 400,000 of the 2.3 million - are at risk of death due to severe acute malnutrition this year, a significant increase from last year’s estimates.

The report also said a lack of funds was hampering humanitarian programmes in Yemen, as donor nations have failed to make good on their commitments. Compounding the crisis, around 1.2 million pregnant or breastfeeding women in Yemen are also projected to be acutely malnourished this year.

“These numbers are yet another cry for help from Yemen, where each malnourished child also means a family struggling to survive,” said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme, which jointly issued the report with the Food and Agriculture Organisation, Unicef and the World Health Organisation. “The crisis in Yemen is a toxic mix of conflict, economic collapse and a severe shortage of funding,” Mr Beasley said. Unicef estimates virtually all of Yemen’s 12 million children require some sort of assistance