Tag Archives: Food Shortage

Famine killing tens of thousands in West Africa : biggest crisis anywhere

By Tom Miles

GENEVA (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of people are dying of hunger in the area of west Africa where Boko Haram militants are active, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the region, told a news conference on Friday.

About 65,000 people are in a “catastrophe” or “phase 5” situation, according to a food security assessment by the IPC, the recognized classification system on declaring famines.

Phase 5 applies when, even with humanitarian assistance, “starvation, death and destitution” are evident.

“The tragedy of using the F word is that when you apply it it’s too late,” said Toby Lanzer, who has also worked in South Sudan, Darfur and Chechnya.

Boko Haram militants have killed about 15,000 people and displaced more than 2 million in a seven-year insurgency and they still launch deadly attacks despite having been pushed out of the vast swathes of territory they controlled in 2014.

“This is the first time I’ve come across people talking about phase 5. The reason for that was simply a lack of access. We couldn’t get to places,” Lanzer said.

“Because of the insecurity sown almost exclusively by Boko Haram, people have missed three planting seasons.”

Asked if it was safe to assume that tens of thousands of people were dying, Lanzer said: “It’s not what we’re assuming, it’s what the IPC states. And I back that number.

“I can tell you from my first trip outside (the regional capital) Maiduguri, I had never gone to places that had adults who were so depleted of energy that they could barely walk.”

One aid agency reported back from the Nigerian town of Bama that its staff had counted the graves of about 430 children who had died of hunger in the past few weeks, Lanzer said.

With millions more short of food in northern Nigerian and regions of the adjoining countries, the situation could get much worse, and could turn into the “biggest crisis facing any of us anywhere”, he said.

“We’re now talking about 568,000 across the Lake Chad basin who are severely malnourished, 400,000 of them are in the northeast of Nigeria. We know that over the next 12 months, 75,000, maybe as many as 80,000, children will die in the northeast of Nigeria, unless we can reach them with specialized therapeutic food,” Lanzer said.

Across the Lake Chad region, more than 6 million people are described as “severely food insecure”, including 4.5 million in Nigeria, he said.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

Hunger ‘deadlier than violence’ in Boko Haram-hit northeast Nigeria

Writings describing Boko Haram are seen on the wall along a street in Bama, in Borno, Nigeria

By Kieran Guilbert

DAKAR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Living conditions for people uprooted by Boko Haram violence and seeking refuge in camps and towns across northeast Nigeria are more deadly than the conflict between the Islamist militants and the army, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Wednesday.

Hunger and malnutrition is widespread among the displaced in Borno State, not just in remote, previously inaccessible areas, but also in the capital Maiduguri, the medical aid group said.

Coordination of relief efforts must be drastically improved and food aid urgently delivered to people in need across Borno, where the humanitarian situation is reaching “catastrophic levels”, said MSF emergency program manager Natalie Roberts.

“It is shocking to see so many people malnourished in Maiduguri, not just in isolated and hard-to-reach areas,” Roberts told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

“Aid actors have access, and there has been no Boko Haram presence for the last few years, but people are starving to death inside Maiduguri. Millions are in a nutrition crisis.”

MSF said it had recently gained access to Ngala and Gambaru, towns previously cut off from aid, where tens of thousands of people have little or nothing to eat and at least one in 10 children are suffering from life-threatening malnutrition.

Yet the medical charity said it was most concerned about the situation in Maiduguri, where malnutrition rates in some parts of the city are as high as those seen in conflict-hit areas.

Boko Haram violence has left more than 65,000 people living in famine in the northeast, with one million others at risk, and more than half of children under five are malnourished in some areas of Borno, several aid groups said last week.

Many women in aid camps in the northeast are resorting to selling sex in exchange for food and money with which to feed their families, medical charity International Medical Corps and Nigerian research group NOI Polls said this week.

Roberts said the aid response across Borno was insufficient and uncoordinated, leaving many people without any assistance.

“Civilians are not receiving aid, and find themselves trapped between Boko Haram and the military’s operations.”

The Islamist militant group has killed about 15,000 people and displaced more than 2 million in Nigeria in a seven-year insurgency aimed at creating a state adhering to Islamic laws.

A military offensive has driven Boko Haram from much of the territory it held in northern Nigeria, but the militants have continued to carry out suicide bombings and raids in northeast Nigeria and neighboring Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

(Reporting by Kieran Guilbert, Editing by Katie Nguyen. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Cost hampers drive to double number of children treated for starvation

Malnourished children wait for medical attention at the Halo health post in Halo village, a drought-stricken area in Oromia region in Ethiopia,

By Alex Whiting

ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A drive to give six million severely malnourished children life-saving treatment every year by 2020 – twice the current number – will only succeed if governments prioritize it alongside other killers and treatment costs are cut, hunger experts said on Thursday.

The number of children treated for severe hunger has plateaued at just over 3 million in recent years, comprising a fraction of the 16 million who need it, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said.

“Severe acute malnutrition is a silent emergency,” said Diane Holland, senior nutrition advisor at UNICEF in New York.

“Greater advocacy around the issue is essential, so that governments, companies and civil society organizations mobilize and make treatment … a priority,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

A child suffering from severe hunger is up to nine times more likely to die from malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea, according to Saul Guerrero, director of nutrition for Action Against Hunger UK.

“The performance and impact of absolutely every intervention worldwide addressing malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea will be significantly enhanced if the children … are simultaneously treated for severe acute malnutrition,” he said from New York.

UNICEF and Action Against Hunger are part of a coalition which aims to double the numbers of children treated for extreme hunger.

No Wasted Lives also includes the European Union, UK government and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation.

Two thirds of children who are severely malnourished are in Asia, and a third in Africa. The majority of cases are in countries where there is no hunger emergency, UNICEF said.

Severe acute malnutrition is treated with a paste of peanuts and dried milk, which costs between $150 and $200 a child, but to boost the number of children on treatment, that price tag needs to drop to less than $100 per child, the coalition said.

Many of the treatments are made in Europe and north America.

So producing more treatments in countries where they are needed, finding cheaper but equally effective ingredients – perhaps chickpeas or sesame seeds – would help cut costs, Guerrero said.

Children also need treatment nearer home – at the moment many have to be taken long distances to a health clinic.

The coalition is proposing that community health workers who treat malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea, are also trained in treating severe hunger.

No Wasted Lives was launched in New York on Tuesday. A high-level U.N. meeting on how to end hunger by 2030, is taking place in New York on Thursday.

(Reporting by Alex Whiting, Editing by Katie Nguyen. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Living like ghosts in the ruins of Syria’s besieged Aleppo

still taken from video on social media showing aleppo's emptiness

By John Davison and Suleiman Al-Khalidi

BEIRUT/AMMAN (Reuters) – Even if it were somehow possible to escape eastern Aleppo, Abdullah Shiyani, a 10-year-old boy who dreams of being a doctor, says he wouldn’t leave. It would mean leaving behind too many people who need help.

“We have a lot of injured people here,” he told Reuters over the Internet. “Maybe we can help them.”

His father was a fighter, killed on the frontline. So he lives with his five siblings in a neighborhood that is almost an empty ghost town. They survive off money from a charity, buying potatoes, parsley and onions when they can. Three weeks ago they even had some meat.

Three of his friends were killed in a rocket attack a few months ago. With school long-since closed, he and his other friends spend their days racing through the empty streets, kicking a ball or playing a game called “guns and knives”.

They duck into buildings when the planes fly overhead, he says, because “we know about the machine guns firing from the planes”.

Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city before civil war uprooted half of the country’s population and killed hundreds of thousands of people, is now the conflict’s biggest prize. Opposition-held areas are now under total siege and heavy bombardment as President Bashar al-Assad’s government attempts to deal a death blow to a five year rebellion.

The city has been divided into rebel and government-held zones for years. But recent months have seen government troops, backed by Russian air strikes and Shi’ite fighters from Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, close in on the rebel zone, where a quarter of a million people remain trapped.

Civilians reached by Reuters over the Internet and telephone tell of a bleak existence amid the ruins — of shortages of food, water and electricity, and incessant fear for their own lives and their loved ones.

“Every day there are about three to four (air) raids close to our house,” said 33-year-old mother-of-one Um Fahd, whose husband, brother and father have all been killed. “Our neighbor’s house was shelled and destroyed. A lot of people have died but we’re still here, thank God.”

She and her son survive on an allowance of $50 a month from a charity, barely enough for food.

“It’s not enough, but we’re grateful for whatever we get,” she said.

In the home she shares with her son, her sister and her sister’s three children, the entire family crams into the sturdiest room in the house whenever they hear warplanes, in the hope it will shield them from bombing.

“When the kids hear the sound of plane, they immediately know that they should go to that room,” she said.

Another woman, Um Ahmed, described how she and her husband careered through gunfire and shelling to flee during a brief window when the siege was broken. When it was reimposed, her two sons and their families remained trapped inside. Her voice trembled as she described her own escape under gunfire.

“I hesitated about leaving. I didn’t want to leave them behind. I haven’t been able to sleep at night, I’m so scared for them, because of the bombardments,” she said.

BROKEN FAMILIES

Aleppo has been one of the Middle East’s great cities for centuries. Its picturesque old center of covered spice markets has long since been reduced to rubble by street fighting. The crisis dramatically intensified earlier this year, when the government side captured territory north of the city, severing a vital supply route to Turkey.

A complete blockade of the rebel-held eastern sector was imposed in July, when pro-government forces severed the last road in. A rebel counter attack, heavily supported by Sunni Muslim jihadist groups, broke the siege in August, but government forces reimposed it in the last few days.

The government-held west of Aleppo holds more people and has also faced increasingly heavy insurgent shelling. But the destruction in the rebel-held east, targeted in daily air strikes, has been far more extensive.

The west came close to being encircled itself during fighting last month as rebels severed the only road in. The advancing government forces secured that route on Friday.

The devastation, death and displacement have left some neighborhoods of the besieged east sparsely populated, residents said. There is little work and no school. Most people spend their days trying to secure enough food to survive, and taking cover when the bombs fall. The children grow up fast.

The director of the al-Quds hospital in eastern Aleppo, Dr Hamza al-Khatib, said that during a recent suspected chlorine gas attack, children young enough to remember little other than war appeared to know instinctively how to react.

“I was shocked how five- or six-year-old children were holding oxygen masks alone, without help – like they were grown men who understood that this was the way to relieve their suffering,” he said.

Rescue workers accused the government of carrying out the Sept. 6 chlorine attack. Damascus denied involvement, saying “terror groups” were behind such attacks. The United Nations has blamed the government for previous attacks using chlorine gas.

When people die, relatives take the kids.

“My wife is looking after the five children my son left behind, and I’m helping her,” said 65-year-old Eid al-Ibrahim, whose eldest son was killed in an air strike.

People sometimes have to fight for their food.

“In our neighborhood they sell bags of five bread loaves … organized by the neighborhood council,” Ibrahim said, describing “a lot of crowding and fighting.”

Brita Hagi Hassan, president of the city council for opposition-held Aleppo, said prices had gone up by 10 times due to shortages induced by the siege. He said around 15 to 20 percent of eastern Aleppo’s residents left during the time the siege was lifted.

Many now eat little but lentils and cracked wheat. Electricity from motor generators is available only for three to six hours a day and damage to power facilities has long left eastern Aleppo with no running water.

Opposition-held neighborhoods have long suffered air strikes and attacks with barrel bombs — drums packed with explosives and shrapnel dropped from the air — from the government side.

The United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry on Syria has condemned the bombing of medical facilities in rebel-held districts, which it said were “explicitly targeted for destruction or assassination” of staff.

Damascus denies targeting civilians. A Syrian military source said the aim is to stop rebel shelling of western Aleppo and to encircle the militants in the east.

(Reporting by John Davison and Suleiman al-Khalidi; additional reporting by Tom Perry; editing by Tom Perry and Peter Graff)

No end in sight for South Africa’s historic drought

Lake St Lucia is almost completely dry due to drought conditions in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, northeast of Durban, South Africa

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – South Africa remains in the grip of a drought that is not expected to ease soon, a government task team said on Thursday, putting pressure on inflation as the cost of staple foods soars.

The long-range forecast showed below normal rainfall expected and “therefore little relief is anticipated in the coming months,” local government minister Des van Rooyen, chairman of an inter-ministerial task team on drought, told a media briefing in Cape Town.

Van Rooyen, flanked by Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane and Agriculture Minister Senzeni Zokwana, said there was no need to declare a national disaster even as the national planting area for maize declined by 30 percent.

The drought has also reduced the national cattle herd by 15 percent with no relief in sight.

“About 370 large commercial farmers around the country… were at risk of going under due to them not being able to service their debts as a result of the drought,” he said.

The cost of staple foods, such as maize, has sky rocketed and had a knock-on effect on inflation, the central bank has said. Inflation is running at 6 percent.

Dam levels have fallen to 53 percent as an El Nino weather pattern, which ended in May, triggered drought conditions across southern Africa and placing millions at risk of food shortages.

Large swathes of scorched land decimated the maize crop, with current forecasts pointing to a 26.6 percent lower harvest this year. Temperatures soared to historic peaks in 2015, the driest year since records started in 1904.

Van Rooyen said water restrictions had been imposed in some provinces. Residents and businesses in the economic hub of Johannesburg are being urged to conserve water usage.

(Reporting by Wendell Roelf; Editing by James Macharia)

Struggling to feed families, Venezuelans abandon pets

Sonrisa is pictured at the Famproa dogs shelter in Los Teques, Venezuela

By Carlos Garcia Rawlins and Girish Gupta

LOS TEQUES, Venezuela (Reuters) – Venezuelans struggling to feed their families, let alone their pets, during the country’s deep economic crisis are increasingly abandoning emaciated dogs in streets, public parks and makeshift shelters because they no longer can afford to care for them.

At one dilapidated sanctuary in the hills outside the capital Caracas, hundreds of scrawny dogs bark and claw through wire mesh to scavenge for food in the streets and forest land nearby.

“The crisis has hit hard,” said Maria Arteaga, 53, who began looking after stray dogs in her own home before founding the shelter in Los Teques, the capital of Miranda state.

“People are abandoning their dogs because they can’t afford food and because they’re leaving the country.”

Every few hours, vehicles pull up and people hand over dogs, including pedigrees. Volunteers arrive daily to donate and help distribute food to the animals.

Though Arteaga does not have a formal register, she has seen an increase in the number of dogs arriving in recent months, with nine poodles dropped off just in the past two weeks.

Suffering through a third year of recession, Venezuelans are experiencing shortages of food and medicine, and are finding salaries wrecked by triple-digit inflation.

A 20-kilogram (44-pound) bag of dog food, for example, costs around $50 at the black-market exchange rate, nearly double its price in the United States and out of reach for many in Venezuela, where the minimum wage is $23 per month.

So sanctuaries like Arteaga’s are proliferating, while ever more stray dogs turn up on the streets. Pet shops are struggling to stock shelves with food and medicine.

The plight of the pets comes despite pushes in the past by the socialist government to protect animal rights. In 2013, for example, President Nicolas Maduro set up Mission Nevado, named for independence hero Simon Bolivar’s dog, to rescue and protect strays.

But now even police are rationing food in order to feed their sniffer dogs.

On one recent day, systems engineer Maria Rodriguez, 33, said she came across a stray dog in Los Teques and her 12-year-old son begged her to keep it to accompany the family’s border collie.

“Sadly our income isn’t enough for us to eat, so how can I give food to two or three dogs?” Rodriguez said, after dropping off the animal at Arteaga’s sanctuary.

(Additional reporting by Daniel Kai; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Will Dunham)

Venezuelans flood Brazil border in 36 hour grocery run

Men load boxes of food onto the back of a pick-up truck, after arriving from Brazil, in front of the bus terminal in Santa Elena de Uairen

By Brian Ellsworth

PACARAIMA, Brazil (Reuters) – Government employee Jose Lara this month used some vacation days to take a long scenic bus ride through the verdant plateaus and sweeping savannas of southern Venezuela, but the trip was anything but a holiday.

It was a 36-hour grocery run.

Lara took an overnight bus and then a pick-up truck to get across the border to neighboring Brazil to buy food staples that have gone scarce in Venezuela’s crisis-stricken economy.

“Workers can’t even enjoy vacation anymore. Look where I am! Buying food for my children,” said Lara, 40, who was preparing to load 30-kilo (66-pound) packages of rice and flour onto a bus to complete a journey that takes close to 36 hours.

Venezuelans seeking to escape their socialist economy’s dysfunction are flooding into the remote Brazilian town of Pacaraima in search of basic goods that are prohibitively expensive or only available after hours in line.

Shoppers have been coming for months, primarily from the industrial city of Puerto Ordaz – already a 12-hour bus ride – but lately they’re also arriving from even more far flung regions across the country.

Venezuelans spend hours in supermarket lines. Many increasingly complain that they cannot get enough food to eat three meals per day.

Low oil prices and massive debt-servicing costs have left the country without foreign exchange to import goods, while price and currency controls have crippled domestic companies’ capacity to produce locally.

President Nicolas Maduro says the government is the victim of an “economic war” led by the United States.

‘THE LINE’

Under pressure from local residents after Maduro shut the western border with Colombian border in 2015, Venezuelan authorities allowed several temporary openings for similar shopping excursions in July. Colombia last month halted those trips after more than 100,000 people crossed in a single weekend.

The more remote Brazilian border was never closed.

In the Pacaraima, known to Venezuelans as “La Linea” or “The Line” because it is immediately across the border, cramped shops are now piled high with sacks of rice, sugar, and flour.

Products piled to waist height stand at the entrance of convenience stores, auto parts shops and even a farm supply store.

“It’s good business, but the price of everything is going up in Boa Vista,” said Mauricio Macedo, 26, who works at a family business that sells artisanal decorations such as clay figurines but for three months has been primarily focused on food items.

Venezuelan regulations require that staple products be sold for a pittance – a kilo of rice is set at the equivalent of $0.12. But obtaining goods at those prices requires waiting in long lines that are increasingly the site of robberies or lootings. That leaves Venezuelans reliant on the black market, where the same bag of rice fetches the equivalent of $2.20.

In Pacaraima, sugar and rice sell for about 40 percent to 45 percent less than what they would cost on Venezuela’s black market. The discount is worth it despite the cost of the trip.

Shoppers usually take a 12-hour overnight bus ride from Puerto Ordaz to the town of Santa Elena de Uairen. They then travel roughly 15 minutes by van or pick-up truck to La Linea. They spend the morning and much of the afternoon shopping, then head back across the border to catch another overnight bus.

“We’re in an economic crisis and I have to come to another country to buy food,” said Juan Sansonetti, 31, standing under the sun with a large sack of flour on his shoulder. “There isn’t much more to say, is there?”

(Editing by Christian Plumb and Kieran Murray)

Venezuelan women seek sterilizations as crisis sours child-rearing

Lisibeht Martinez (L), 30, who was sterilized one year ago, sits next to her children while they play in a bathtub in the backyard of their house

By Alexandra Ulmer

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s food shortages, inflation and crumbling medical sector have become such a source of anguish that a growing number of young women are reluctantly opting for sterilizations rather than face the hardship of pregnancy and child-rearing.

Traditional contraceptives like condoms or birth control pills have virtually vanished from store shelves, pushing women toward the hard-to-reverse surgery.

“Having a child now means making him suffer,” said Milagros Martinez, waiting on a park bench on a recent morning ahead of her sterilization at a nearby Caracas municipal health center.

The 28-year-old butcher from the poor outskirts of Caracas decided on the operation after having an unplanned second child because she could not find birth control pills.

Her daily life revolves around finding food: she gets up in the middle of the night to stand in long lines outside supermarkets, sometimes with no choice but to bring along her baby son, who has been sunburnt during hours-long waits.

“I’m a little scared about being sterilized but I prefer that to having more children,” said Martinez, who with dozens of other women took a bus from the slums at 4 a.m. to attend a special “sterilization day” in this wealthy area of Caracas.

While no recent national statistics on sterilizations are available, doctors and health workers say demand for the procedure is growing.

For a Wider Image photo essay, see http://reut.rs/2atW2ZL

The local health program for women in Miranda state, which includes parts of Caracas, offers 40 spots during these “sterilization days” but as recently as last year did not usually fill them.

Now all the slots are scooped up and some 500 women are on the waiting list, according to program director Deliana Torres.

“Before, the conditions for this program were that the women be low-income and have at least four kids. Now we have women with one or two kids who want to be tied up,” she said.

Health workers at a national family planning organization and at three government hospitals in the states of Falcon, Tachira and Merida echoed her view that demand for sterilizations had grown in recent months.

The trend highlights how the oil-rich nation’s brutal recession is forcing people to make difficult choices.

Venezuela is a largely Roman Catholic country where Church doctrine rejects all forms of contraception and abortion is banned unless a woman’s life is at risk. The Archbishop of Merida, Baltazar Porras, told Reuters an increase in sterilizations would be a “barbarity.”

But Venezuela’s crisis has triggered almost daily riots for food and slammed a shrinking middle class as well as the poor who were once a bastion of support for late leftist leader Hugo Chavez’s self-styled “beautiful revolution.”

Pregnant women are particularly affected as they struggle to find adequate food and supplements, give birth in crowded and under-equipped hospitals, and have to spend hours in lines for scarce diapers, baby food and medicines.

The government ministries for health, women and information did not respond to requests for comment.

‘I WANTED FIVE KIDS’

Sterilizations are usually straightforward procedures that involve closing or blocking a woman’s fallopian tubes, known as tubal ligation.

“I heard about these free sterilization days on the radio. Immediately I showered, dressed, and went out (to find out about them),” said Rosmary Teran, 32, who had her second child two months ago and also came to the health center from a poor neighborhood before dawn.

Some health workers fear the economic meltdown is putting pressure on women to make a choice they may come to regret if the crisis eases.

“Sometimes we hear: ‘My husband told me to get sterilized because another child now wouldn’t be practical’,” said social worker Ania Rodriguez at family planning group PLAFAM in central Caracas.

Rodriguez says she meets with up to five women a day seeking sterilizations, up from one or two per week about a year ago. When women seem unsure or pressured into sterilizations, Rodriguez tries to steer them toward contraceptives like intra-uterine devices, which are somewhat more available and affordable than birth control pills or condoms.

When they have them, pharmacies sell a pack of three condoms for around 600 bolivars, only 60 U.S. cents at the black market rate but a big expense for those who earn the minimum wage of some 33,000 bolivars per month. On the Caracas re-sale market, those same condoms fetch around 2,000 bolivars.

Venezuela’s elite can afford those prices but the ailing middle class and poor are increasingly stuck.

“I couldn’t find the (contraceptive) injections, the pill, nothing. It’s very expensive on the black market, and now you can’t even find stuff there anymore,” said Yecsenis Ginez, 31, who has one son and decided to get sterilized.

“I thought I would have up to five kids, I had loads of names in mind. But it would be crazy to fall pregnant now.”

Still, some women have had to wait for months to be sterilized because there are limited spots at state-led hospitals and private clinics can charge about 12 times the monthly minimum wage. And some health centers are unable to provide sterilizations at all due to a lack of equipment or specialists.

DISARRAY

Amid what now feels like a distant oil boom, Chavez built thousands of Cuban-staffed health centers in poor neighborhoods and also launched popular maternity-health programs during his 1999-2013 rule.

But with Venezuela’s state-led economic model decaying and oil prices depressed, hospitals have deteriorated sharply under his successor Nicolas Maduro.

Medicine shortages hover around 85 percent, according to a leading pharmaceutical association. Equipment ranging from surgical gloves to incubators is scarce, and many underpaid doctors have left the public sector or emigrated.

The government still says it has one of the world’s best health systems and accuses detractors of waging a smear campaign. It has stopped releasing timely health data, though.

The World Health Organization says Venezuela’s neo-natal mortality rate was 8.9 per 1,000 live births last year, above the Americas region’s average of 7.7. It says Venezuela’s maternal mortality rate was 95 per 100,000 live births in 2015, one of the worst rates in Latin America and up from 90 in 2000.

The nation of 30 million people has one of Latin America’s highest rates of teenage pregnancies and large numbers of single-parent households, U.N. data shows.

As they waited to be called into the operating room for their sterilizations, women in blue scrubs and hairnets wistfully recalled happier times in once-booming Venezuela.

“Before, when you got pregnant, everyone was happy,” said mother-of-two Yessy Ascanio, 38, as she sat on a bed in a side room. “Now when a woman says ‘I’m pregnant’, everyone scolds you. It makes me sad for young women.”

As some of her peers nervously looked out at patients being wheeled out after their sterilization, Ascanio advised: “If you get scared, just remember those food lines.”

(Additional reporting by Mircely Guanipa in Punto Fijo, Anggy Polanco in San Cristobal, and Sarah Dagher and Daniel Kai in Caracas; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne, Stuart Grudgings and Kieran Murray)

Venezuelan schoolchildren express hunger in drawings

A drawing made during a lesson at a school shows what a student ate during the course of a day in Caracas, Venezuela July 14, 2016. The student wrote, "Ate corn cake with cheese for breakfast; had spaghetti with egg for lunch and a cookie for dinner." The student said that pizza was their favourite dish.

By Daniel Kai

CARACAS (Reuters) – When children at a Catholic-run school in a poor neighborhood of Venezuela’s Caracas capital began fainting from hunger, teachers asked them to draw or describe their most recent meals and what they expected to eat next.

The responses were shocking.

Some of the 478 kindergarten and primary students had gone without breakfast and were skipping other meals. Others expected to eat only bread, yucca or “arepa,” a form of cornmeal flatbread that is a local staple.

The drawings and texts at the Padre Jose Maria Velaz school in western Caracas are another symptom of the oil-rich South American nation’s deep economic crisis and its effects on nutrition and eating habits.

Due to the faltering socialist economy and the plunge in global oil prices, Venezuela has been in recession since early 2014. It suffers from the world’s highest inflation and is experiencing shortages of basic goods, from milk to medicines.

Huge lines at shops and pharmacies are now the norm, and hungry residents are quickly stripping the nation’s lush mango, coconut and papaya trees.

Depicting their latest meals, some students at Padre Jose Maria Velaz drew just mangoes and plantains. One said he had eaten rice and beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Another said he had no breakfast. “We are waiting for food.

“I have pasta and ham for lunch,” he added. “I’m hungry.”

School director Maria Hidalgo said one in four children there were eating inadequately, and some teachers had also fainted from hunger.

“It’s dramatic, what we are going through,” Hidalgo said. “What kind of Venezuela are we going to have in 10 years?”

Critics say Venezuela’s crisis is the fault of economic policies under President Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez. But the government says it is the victim of an “economic war” led by opposition politicians, businessmen and the United States.

Alexis Marin, who runs the food program for state schools, said children were receiving proper supplies.

“With all the economic war, they couldn’t destroy the school food program,” he told state TV.

The children at Padre Jose Maria Velaz at least had a happy reprieve: Nearby private textile company Telares de Palo Grande and local charity Mi Convive recently organized a party around a healthy meat soup for all to mark the end of the school year.

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Nigeria Children face death from hunger unless aid arrives soon

Children displaced as a result of Boko Haram attacks in the northeast region of Nigeria, cheer at a camp for internally displaced persons

DAKAR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Tens of thousands of children in northeast Nigeria will die of malnutrition this year unless they receive treatment soon, the United Nations said on Friday after reaching areas of the country previously cut off from aid by Boko Haram violence.

Over the last year Nigeria’s army, aided by troops from neighboring countries, recaptured most of the territory that was lost to the militant group, which has waged a seven-year insurgency aimed at creating an Islamic state in the northeast.

“Improving security has enabled humanitarians to access areas that were previously cut off,” Munir Safieldin, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Nigeria, said in a statement.

“The conditions we are seeing there are devastating.”

The conflict, which has killed more than 15,000 people and uprooted 2.4 million in Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, has also pushed food insecurity and malnutrition to emergency levels in northeast Nigeria, according to the Nigerian government.

More than a half a million people need urgent food aid, as the violence has hit farming, disrupted markets and driven up food prices, several U.N. agencies said in a joint statement.

Almost 250,000 children under the age of five in Borno state will suffer from malnutrition this year, said Jean Gough, Nigeria representative for the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.

“Unless we reach these children with treatment, one in five of them will die,” she said. “We cannot allow that to happen.”

While the United Nations and its partners have gained access to several areas in Borno in recent months, it said many remain unreachable due to the ongoing violence and lack of security.

The medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) last week gained access to a camp in Borno’s city of Bama, hosting 24,000 people, including 15,000 children, for the first time since it was seized back from Boko Haram in March 2015.

More than 1,200 people have died from starvation and illness in the camp on a hospital compound, according to MSF, who said “a catastrophic humanitarian emergency” was unfolding in Bama.

Nigeria’s army last week said it had freed more than 5,000 people held by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram during an operation in the northeast of the country.

However, the jihadist group, which last year pledged loyalty to Islamic State, still regularly stages suicide bombings, mainly in crowded areas such as markets and places of worship.

(Reporting By Kieran Guilbert, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)