Tag Archives: Famine

Venezuelans revel in pots-and-pans protests after Maduro humiliation

people banging pots in Venezuela

By Alexandra Ulmer

MARACAIBO, Venezuela (Reuters) – For over a decade, Venezuelan opposition supporters would clang pots and pans on balconies of middle-class apartments to protest late leader Hugo Chavez’s self-styled “21st century socialism.”

While sometimes deafening, the protests never seemed to get under the skin of the charismatic leftist, whose supporters often countered with fireworks from shanty towns, and many in the opposition ended up deeming them futile.

But the ‘cacerolazo’, as such protests are known round South America, returned with a bang a few days ago when a pot-wielding crowd ran after Chavez’s unpopular successor Nicolas Maduro in a previously pro-government working class neighborhood of Margarita island.

Amazed and amused by the sight of the normally hyper-protected Maduro humiliated in public, opposition supporters are now flaunting their kitchenware nationwide to taunt the man they blame for a dire economic crisis that has many families skipping meals.

“Now it feels completely different because there’s no food, there’s hunger, and this thug we have as president is scared of ‘cacerolazos’!” said protester Migdalia Ortega, 59, beside a handful of women banging pots along a main avenue in Maracaibo, an oil city full of shuttered stores and littered with garbage.

“We had stopped using the pots and pans in marches but now we’re going to bring them every time,” she added, as a few hundred protesters prepared to march under the sizzling tropical sun to demand a recall referendum against Maduro.

The former bus driver and union leader has not spoken publicly about the incident in Margarita, which sparked a frenzy of jokes and cartoons. One showed him overtaking Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt to avoid pots being thrown his way.

Government officials say the grainy videos of Maduro surrounded by jeering protesters were “manipulated” by pro-opposition media and maintain he was actually cheered by supporters after inspecting state housing projects.

Still, authorities briefly rounded up more than 30 people for heckling him. A prominent journalist is in jail – and charged with money laundering – after publicizing the protest.

Recalling protests against government members at restaurants, houses and even funeral parlors, Socialist Party lawmaker Elias Jaua said pots-and-pans protests should be considered a punishable offense if they promote “intolerance.”

During Chavez’s 14-year rule, their use reached a crescendo around a failed 36-hour coup attempt in 2002 and a strike that crippled the oil industry from late that year into 2003.

‘REBELLION’

“The ‘cacerolazo’ is even more relevant today because it is a symbol of rebellion,” said artist Cecilia Leonardi, 54, who said she has cut back on meat and legumes because they are unavailable or too expensive, while banging a pot in Maracaibo.

‘Cacerolazos’ came to the fore under Chile’s late socialist President Salvador Allende in the early 1970s, when middle- and upper-class women would bang on pots to protest shortages.

They transcend political lines: ‘cacerolazos’ have taken place this year against both Argentina’s center-right president Mauricio Macri and Brazil’s now-ousted leftist leader Dilma Rousseff.

In Venezuela, ‘cacerolazos’ have been a defining symbol of anti-socialist opponents, many of whom come from the middle and upper classes. Chavez, who died from cancer in 2013, used to mock them as a “parasitic bourgeoisie” intent on getting its hands back on the OPEC country’s oil reserves.

One government-employed ‘Chavista’ in western Zulia state said she was becoming disillusioned with Maduro but still did not have faith in his opponents.

“The ‘cacerolazos’ are useless: why doesn’t the opposition give us (policy) proposals instead?” she said, asking to remain anonymous because she feared for her job at a state university.

“If they put forward a coherent proposal, even I would join them. But for now I’ll stick to the devil I know.”

Some former government supporters, however, are now joining the pots-and-pans protests.

Suffering a third year of recession and triple-digit inflation, many poor Venezuelans say they are skipping meals and forgoing protein-rich meats and beans as they often emerge empty-handed from shops despite hours in line.

“Sometimes we only eat once a day,” said Marjorie Rodriguez, an angry former Chavez supporter and mother-of-three, who described putting on a shirt and hat in the colors of the national flag earlier this week to bang pots in her poor

Ciudad Ojeda neighborhood, next to oil-rich Maracaibo Lake.

“We have to get rid of this president so that products start arriving again,” said Rodriguez, stood in a hot line under the midday sun with dozens of others hoping to buy pasta.

(Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Kieran Murray)

Venezuela denies zoo animals starving, says one happy family

starving lion at Venezuelan zoo

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s government denied on Monday that zoo animals were dying of starvation amid a national food shortage, saying they were being lovingly treated “like family.”

Minister for Ecosocialism and Water Ernesto Paiva toured Caricuao zoo in Caracas, where a union leader last week said 50 animals including Vietnamese pigs, tapirs, rabbits and birds had starved to death in the last six months.

“The animals are very dear, treated as if they were family, in fact they all have names,” said Paiva, adding that they were being seen by nutritionists to ensure they had an adequate diet.

The official said widespread media reports of deplorable conditions for zoo animals in the recession-hit OPEC nation were part of a campaign of “lies” against the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro.

A union leader for employees of state parks agency Inparques, which oversees zoos, and sources at various facilities have said animals are suffering across the country, with lions being fed mangoes instead of meat and bears receiving less than half of their required intake.

Despite the minister’s assurances that the Caricuao animals were healthy and adequately fed, state prosecutors are investigating the deaths of “various species of wildlife” there.

(Reporting by Daniel Kai; Writing by Girish Gupta; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Sandra Maler)

Child hunger and death rising in Zimbabwe due to drought, charity says

By Katy Migiro

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Child hunger and deaths are rising in Zimbabwe due to the worst drought in two decades, with thousands facing starvation by the end of the year without additional aid, an international charity said on Thursday.

Southern Africa has been hard hit over the past year by drought exacerbated by El Niño, a warming of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which has wilted crops, slowed economic growth and driven food prices higher.

“This is an emergency,” Save the Children UK’s interim chief executive Tanya Steele said in a statement, after visiting Binga, on Zimbabwe’s western border with Zambia.

“Some children are already dying of complications from malnutrition.”

Mothers are foraging for wild berries and roots to feed their children, while going without food themselves for up to five days, the charity said.

The number of under-fives who have died of hunger-related causes in Binga town has reached 200 over the last 18 months — triple the usual rate, it said.

More than 60 million people, two thirds of them in east and southern Africa, are facing food shortages because of droughts linked to El Nino, according to the United Nations.

The U.N. World Food Programme estimates around 4 million people — one in three Zimbabweans — are struggling to meet their basic food needs.

The peak of the emergency is likely to be between October and March, the U.N. children’s fund (UNICEF) said.

Hundreds of young children across the country are being admitted to hospital for malnutrition each month, it said, while child neglect, abuse and child labor are on the rise.

HIV/AIDS is often one of the underlying causes of malnutrition in Zimbabwe, where 15 percent of adults are living with the disease, U.N. figures show.

The number of children suffering malnutrition is expected to rise sharply in the coming months, Save the Children said.

“Most of the severely malnourished children who receive no help are likely to die,” it said.

“Around half of these with moderate acute malnutrition could also perish without some form of intervention.”

El Nino ended in May but meteorologists predict a La Nina event, which usually brings floods to southern Africa, is likely to develop in the second half of this year,

Erratic, late rains in Zimbabwe led to a poor harvest in April, with some families suffering their second or third consecutive year of poor production, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET).

(Reporting by Katy Migiro; Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories.)

‘We Want Food!’ Venezuelans cry out at protest

People run away from police (on motorcycle) during riots for food in Caracas

By Efrain Otero and Marco Bello

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan security forces fired teargas at protesters chanting “We want food!” near Caracas’ presidential palace on Thursday, the latest street violence in the crisis-hit OPEC nation.

Hundreds of angry Venezuelans heading toward Miraflores palace in downtown Caracas were met by National Guard troops and police who blocked a major road.

President Nicolas Maduro, under intense pressure over a worsening economic crisis in the South American nation of 30 million, had been scheduled to address a rally of indigenous groups nearby around the same time.

The protest spilled out of long lines at shops in the area, witnesses said, after some people tried to hijack a food truck.

“I’ve been here since eight in the morning. There’s no more food in the shops and supermarkets,” one woman told pro-opposition broadcaster Vivoplay.

“We’re hungry and tired.”

The government accused opposition politicians of inciting the chaos but said security forces had the situation under control.

Despite their country having the world’s biggest oil reserves, Venezuelans are suffering severe shortages of consumer goods ranging from milk to flour, soaring prices and a shrinking economy.

Maduro blames the fall in global oil prices and an “economic war” by his foes, whom he also accuses of seeking a coup.

“Every day, they bring out violent groups seeking violence in the streets,” he said in a speech at the indigenous rally, which went ahead near Miraflores later in the day. “And every day, the people reject them and expel them.”

Critics say Venezuela’s economic chaos is the consequence of failed socialist policies for the last 17 years, especially price and currency controls.

The opposition wants a referendum this year to recall Maduro. Protests over shortages, power cuts and crime occur daily, and looting and lynchings are on the rise.

Several local journalists said they were robbed during Thursday’s chaos in downtown Caracas.

The government’s top economic official, Miguel Perez, acknowledged the hardships Venezuelans were undergoing but promised the situation would improve.

“We know this month has been really critical. It’s been the month with the lowest supply of products. That’s why families are anxious,” he told local radio.

“We guarantee things will improve in the next few weeks.”

(Additional reporting by Daniel Kai, Corina Pons, Diego Ore and Deisy Buitrago; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Girish Gupta; Editing by James Dalgleish; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Venezuela opposition slams ‘desperate’ Maduro state of emergency

Rally with Monkey Signs

By Alexandra Ulmer and Corina Pons

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s opposition on Saturday slammed a state of emergency decreed by President Nicolas Maduro and vowed to press home efforts to remove the leftist leader this year amid a grim economic crisis.

Maduro on Friday night declared a 60-day state of emergency due to what he called plots from Venezuela and the United States to subvert him. He did not provide specifics.

The measure shows Maduro is panicking as a push for a recall referendum against him gains traction with tired, frustrated Venezuelans, opposition leaders said during a protest in Caracas.

“We’re talking about a desperate president who is putting himself on the margin of legality and constitutionality,” said Democratic Unity coalition leader Jesus Torrealba, adding Maduro was losing support within his own bloc.

“If this state of emergency is issued without consulting the National Assembly, we would technically be talking about a self-coup,” he told hundreds of supporters who waved Venezuelan flags and chanted “he’s going to fall.”

The opposition won control of the National Assembly in a December election, propelled by voter anger over product shortages, raging inflation that has annihilated salaries, and rampant violent crime, but the legislature has been routinely undercut by the Supreme Court.

“A TIME BOMB”

Protests are on the rise and a key poll shows nearly 70 percent of Venezuelans now say Maduro must go this year.

Maduro has vowed to see his term through, however, blasting opposition politicians as coup-mongering elitists seeking to emulate the impeachment of fellow leftist Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.

Saying trouble-makers were fomenting violence to justify a foreign invasion, Maduro on Saturday ordered military exercises for next weekend.

“We’re going to tell imperialism and the international right that the people are present, with their farm instruments in one hand and a gun in the other… to defend this sacred land,” he boomed at a rally.

He added the government would take over idled factories, without providing details.

Critics of Maduro, a former union leader and bus driver, say he should instead focus on people’s urgent needs.

“There will be a social explosion if Maduro doesn’t let the recall referendum happen,” said protester Marisol Dos Santos, 34, an office worker at a supermarket where she says some 800 people queue up daily.

But the opposition fear authorities are trying to delay a referendum until 2017, when the presidency would fall to the vice president, a post currently held by Socialist Party loyalist Aristobulo Isturiz.

“If you block this democratic path we don’t know what might happen in this country,” two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles said at the demonstration.

“Venezuela is a time bomb that can explode at any given moment.”

(Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Famine threatens half of Yemen, U.N. agency says

SANAA (Reuters) – Nearly half of Yemen’s 22 provinces on the verge of famine as result of the war there and more than 13 million people need food aid, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) says.

Aid groups have blamed curbs imposed by the Saudi-led coalition on access to Houthi-controlled ports for the crisis and also accuse Houthis of preventing supplies from reaching some areas, including the city of Taiz in the southwest.

“From a food security perspective, 10 of Yemen’s 22 provinces are classified as emergency, which is one step before famine,” Adham Musallam, deputy director of the WFP office in the capital Sanaa, said as the agency launched a food voucher program to help the most needy.

Fighting over the past year has displaced about 2.3 million people and left more than half of Yemen’s 26 million population in need of food aid, Musallam said.

“This means that we must not wait until the situation reaches famine but must act now to provide humanitarian aid directly,” Musallam said.

The Houthis took over Sanaa in September 2014, ousting President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, then seized his temporary headquarters in the southern port city of Aden.

The Saudi-led Arab coalition intervened in March 2015 to try to restore Hadi to power and roll back Houthi gains. More than 6,200 people have been killed in the conflict, half of them civilians.

To counter the food crisis, the WFP has launched a program of emergency food vouchers to provide up to one million people with basic needs eventually.

In Sanaa, which is still under Houthi control, hundreds of people queued for hours to register for the vouchers. Under the program a family of six receives wheat grain, pulses, vegetable oil, salt and sugar provided by the WFP through a local supplier.

But one Sanaa resident expressed concern that the aid might not be sustained.

“We would like to have rations provided for the entire month, not just for a week or five days,” he told Reuters TV.

Many Yemenis have sought refuge in Sanaa after air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition destroyed their homes, especially in northern Yemen, where the Houthis, a Zaydi Shi’ite group, come from.

The United Nations, which had hosted two inconclusive rounds of peace talks in Switzerland last year, is pressing ahead on the diplomatic front for another round of negotiations. A senior Yemeni official said on Tuesday it might take place in Kuwait next month.

“The Yemeni people appreciate the need for humanitarian assistance but what they really need is an end to the war which is more important,” said Radman Hassan, a food voucher recipient.

(Writing by Sami Aboudi, editing by Sylvia Westall and Angus MacSwan)

El Niño leaves millions of Africans vulnerable to hunger, thirst, disease

A abnormally strong El Niño weather pattern and extreme droughts have left millions of Africans vulnerable to hunger, water shortages and disease, a United Nations agency warned on Wednesday, including about 1 million severely malnourished children who need treatment.

The U.N. Children’s Emergency Fund, or UNICEF, said those children are located in Eastern and Southern Africa, where the extreme weather has adversely affected food supplies. It said families there have skipped meals or sold some of their possessions to cope with rising prices.

In a statement, Leila Gharagozloo-Pakkala, the agency’s regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa, called the situation “unprecedented” and warned of a long-lasting effect.

“The El Niño weather phenomenon will wane, but the cost to children – many who were already living hand-to-mouth – will be felt for years to come,” Gharagozloo-Pakkala said.

Meteorologists have said this season’s El Niño is one of the strongest on record and its effects are likely to continue well into 2016. However, the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs has estimated that areas affected by the El Niño-fueled drought will likely need two years to recover.

El Niño occurs when part of the Pacific Ocean is warmer than usual, setting off a ripple effect that brings atypical and often extreme weather throughout the world. It has been blamed for creating droughts in some nations and floods in others, both of which can destroy harvests.

Last week, four agencies issued a joint statement warning the weather pattern could devastate Southern Africa’s upcoming harvests. The World Food Programme, Food and Agricultural Organization, Famine Early Warning Systems Network and European Commission’s Joint Research Centre said parts of Southern Africa are in the midst of their driest season in 35 years, with Zimbabwe, Lesotho and many South African provinces declaring drought emergencies.

Other nations have implemented measures to reduce water consumption because of low levels.

Two of the harder-hit nations are South Africa and Malawi, and the agencies said maize prices surged to record-high levels in those countries. The agencies warned the window of opportunity to plant crops in Southern Africa had nearly closed, and forecasts point to another poor harvest.

“Over the coming year, humanitarian partners should prepare themselves for food insecurity levels and food insecure population numbers in southern Africa to be at their highest levels since the 2002-2003 food crisis,” the agencies warned, saying it was too early for an exact figure.

Any increase would add to the millions of people who currently need food aid.

That includes more than 10 million Ethiopians, a total UNICEF says could reach 18 million by December. The agency says children have skipped school because they have to search for water.

UNICEF says about 2.8 million people are at risk of going hungry in Malawi, while food insecurity poses an issue for 2.8 million Zimbabwe residents and 800,000 people in Angola.

El Niño has also brought heavy rains to Kenya, which UNICEF says is fueling cholera outbreaks.

The World Food Programme also recently said El Niño has hurt Haiti’s agriculture industry.

The weather isn’t the only the thing impacting people’s ability to secure food.

Violent conflicts have spurred food shortages in other nations, and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network says “emergency” conditions now exist in parts of South Sudan and Yemen.

Aid reaches besieged Syrian towns as planned

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Trucks carrying humanitarian aid entered five besieged areas of Syria scheduled for deliveries on Wednesday in a U.N.-backed deal to deliver help to thousands of trapped residents, an aid agency source and conflict monitor said.

The Syrian government approved access to seven besieged areas after crisis talks in Damascus on Tuesday, a week ahead of a planned resumption of peace negotiations between Syria’s warring parties.

The United Nations estimates there are 486,700 people in around 15 besieged areas of Syria, and 4.6 million people in hard-to-reach areas. In some, starvation deaths and severe malnutrition have been reported.

One hundred truckloads of aid were given to about 100,000 people, the United Nations said, as convoys entered Madaya, Zabadani and Mouadamiya al-Sham near Damascus which have been under siege by government forces, and the villages of al-Foua and Kefraya in Idlib province, which are surrounded by rebel fighters.

There have been several aid deliveries to Madaya and Zabadani and to al-Foua and Kefraya this year, but each has to be carefully synchronized between the warring sides so that convoys enter simultaneously.

The Syrian Red Crescent coordinated with the United Nations on the deliveries, which include wheat and high-energy foods, with medical teams being sent to some areas.

The world body has demanded unhindered access to all besieged areas of the country, where it says hundreds of thousands of people are trapped by fighting and deliberate blockades by various warring sides.

In Madaya, near the border with Lebanon, dozens have starved to death after months of siege by government forces and their allies.

In the city of Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria, parts of which are under siege by Islamic State militants, unverified reports have said up to 20 people have died of starvation.

Deir al-Zor was one of the seven areas to which the aid convoys were expected to head within the next few days, the United Nations said.

Yacoub el-Hillo, U.N. humanitarian and resident coordinator in Syria, said aid operations must continue beyond recent efforts to restart peace talks, but a solution to the root of the problem must also be found.

A humanitarian task force will meet in Geneva on Thursday to take stock of humanitarian access to besieged areas, a statement from the office of the special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said. That was in line with an agreement on humanitarian assistance reached in Munich last week by major and regional powers.

UNRELENTING FIGHTING

Syria’s opposition says it will not negotiate with Damascus until sieges imposed by government forces and their allies have been lifted – one of many issues that led to a suspension of the peace talks in Geneva earlier this month.

Talks are scheduled to resume on Feb. 25, but fighting and air strikes continue unabated throughout the country, where 250,000 people have been killed in five years of war.

In the town immediately next to Mouadamiya, Daraya, the Syrian army and allied forces continue a major offensive to take back the rural suburbs of Damascus still in rebel hands.

In Deraa city, south of Damascus, jets believed to be Russian pounded insurgent positions on Wednesday near a now-closed rebel-held border crossing with Jordan. The attacks appeared aimed at cutting rebel supply lines.

A fighter from al-Tawhid al-Janub Brigade, part of the Southern Front rebel alliance, said the bombing of the old quarter of Deraa city, which has been in rebel hands for nearly three years and whose residents have fled since the start of the conflict, was the heaviest in over two years. The army controls the rest of the city.

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington in Beirut, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman, Kinda Makiyeh and Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by John Davison; Editing by Dominic , John Stonestreet and Peter Cooney)

Yemen city on the brink of famine, U.N. agency warns

Residents of one Yemen city are on the brink of famine, a United Nations agency warned Monday, as violent conflicts have prevented humanitarian workers from supplying food.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it delivered food to Al Qahira, a besieged area of the Taiz governorate, on Saturday, bringing enough food to last 18,000 people for one month. But it said Taiz remains at an “emergency” level on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification scale, one step below famine, and workers must be allowed to continue to deliver aid there.

The WFP said it has been delivering food to some parts of Taiz since December, though fighting between Houthi militants and government forces has complicated the agency’s efforts to move the supplies to the people in need. In a news release, it said about 20 percent of households in Taiz don’t have enough food, and many are facing “life-threatening rates of acute malnutrition.”

Taiz is far from the only Yemen city affected by fighting.

The UN says about 21.2 million of the country’s 26 million residents need some humanitarian aid, a 33 percent increase since violence erupted last March. The WFP says approximately 7.6 million Yemen residents are now “severely food insecure,” which requires urgent assistance.

Other countries are also in need of aid.

On Tuesday, the WFP said it was planning to deliver food this month to 35,000 people who have been affected by Boko Haram’s violent insurgency in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. In a statement, the agency said it recently supplied food to 5,000 people in Chad for the first time.

“We were told that people have been really struggling to survive. Some said that they have been surviving only on maize for weeks,” Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the WFP’s Country Director for Chad, said in a statement announcing the increased humanitarian efforts. “We have started distributions at five sites where the needs are most critical and we are working to reach others.”

The WFP said some 5.6 million people are facing hunger as a result of Boko Haram’s violence, which has prompted 2.8 million people to flee their homes — 400,000 since December alone.

Last week, the WFP issued warnings about the food situations in South Sudan and Haiti, saying that about 6 million people in those countries were facing food insecurity. That included 40,000 residents of war-torn South Sudan that UN agencies said were “on the brink of catastrophe.”

In Yemen war, hospitals bombed to rubble, starvation spreads

DUBAI (Reuters) – Elderly Hamama Yousif was rushed to the main hospital in one of Yemen’s largest cities after an artillery round lashed her chest with shrapnel, only to find that the doctors there had run out of the oxygen tanks needed to save her life.

In a video captured by local news station Yemen Youth TV, worried relatives carry her, still talking, to almost every clinic and hospital in the war-torn city of Taiz – none had any oxygen – until motionless and dead, she was finally taken to the morgue.

Once known as “Arabia Felix” or happy Arabia, Yemen has been disfigured by 10 months of war into one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, where over half the population faces hunger and not even hospitals are spared.

The wounded and the dying find little comfort in al-Thawra hospital in the southwestern city of Taiz: Pressure from nearby shelling has blown out all the windows and several direct hits have reduced one ward nearly to dust.

“Our situation is disastrous in every possible way,” said Sadeq Shujaa, head of the local doctor’s union.

“Shelling hit the only cancer hospital and the children’s hospital, shutting them down. The war has sent doctors fleeing for their lives to the countryside and siege tactics mean we have to smuggle in medicine through mountain passes.”

Taiz is contested between local militias and the armed Houthi group which many residents say blocks aid from entering and bombs civilian targets. It is one of the worst fronts of the war, in which forces loyal to a government ousted by the Houthis in March are seeking to fight back to the capital Sanaa.

After the government fled into exile, a Saudi-led alliance of Arab states joined the war to restore it, recapturing the port city of Aden where President Abd Rabbu Mansour al-Hadi is now based.

Riyadh and its allies have launched hundreds of air strikes, sent in ground troops and set up a naval blockade to restrict goods reaching the country. The Saudis say the Houthis, drawn mainly from a Shi’ite sect that ruled a thousand-year kingdom in north Yemen until 1962, are puppets of Shi’ite Iran.

The Houthis have allied themselves with army units loyal to long-serving former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and say they are leading a revolution against a corrupt government in thrall to the foreign invaders. They deny receiving support from Iran.

STAGGERING CRISIS

The fighting has killed around 6,000 people, about half of them civilians. Many times more are now in danger as a result of the humanitarian catastrophe wrought by the conflict.

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) warns of a “staggering” food crisis, saying famine looms as over half the population or some 14.4 million people are food insecure.

“The economy shrank by 35 percent in 2015. People who used to have decent standards of living have become Yemen’s ‘new poor’ because with no electricity to power their business and no fuel to get anywhere, they have no way to earn money,” said Mohammed al-Assadi of UNICEF.

“2.4 million people are internally displaced. In these conditions there’s no easy access to basic hygiene or healthcare, and now about 320,000 children under five years old are severely malnourished,” he added.

On the outskirts of Sanaa and in towns outside Taiz, clusters of shabby tent encampments housing thousands of families fleeing nearby violence have cropped up, where jobless parents idle and many children shrivel with hunger.

In peacetime, impoverished Yemen imported 90 percent of its staple foods. Much of the 4 percent of the arid country that is arable land now lies untilled because of the war.

“Besides the humanitarian catastrophes, a lack of jobs paves the way for a social and political crisis in which work skills erode and some people join the war effort to earn a living, feeding a cycle of violence,” said Salah Elhajj Hassan of FAO.

HIDING IN CAVES

Workers from the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), among the few foreign aid groups operating in Yemen’s worst war zones, have suffered repeated attacks in the far northern province of Saada straddling the Saudi border.

An ambulance from an MSF-affiliated hospital rushed to the scene of a suspected Saudi-led air strike on Jan. 21, but just as crowds gathered to assist the victims another bomb fell and killed a medic.

An MSF hospital was bombed on Oct. 27 in what the Saudi-led coalition says was a strike intended to target militiamen nearby.

Brigadier General Ahmed al-Asseri, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, said the foreign forces were working to reduce civilian deaths, but aid groups like MSF should prevent Houthi fighters from approaching their facilities.

As Yemeni society becomes increasingly militarized, combatants are often mixed among civilians. Rights group Human Rights Watch blamed Houthis for basing forces in a center for the blind in the capital that was bombed on Jan. 5.

The bomb did not explode, but rendered the facility unusable.

Days after the blast, a young boy with grey sightless eyes felt his way through the rubble and picked up a dead pigeon, in a moment captured by a local cameraman that has embodied for many Yemenis the sadness of the war.

Fear now reigns even where aid is available. MSF official Teresa Sancristoval said in a statement that most of the 40,000 residents in an area near an MSF hospital bombed on Jan. 10 now live in caves to avoid Saudi-led air strikes.

“Since the attack, there have been no deliveries in the maternity room – pregnant women are giving birth in caves rather than risk coming to the hospital,” she said.

(Editing by William Maclean and Peter Graff)