Tag Archives: World Food Program

Growing global food catastrophe

Caracus Overpopulation

Luke 21:11 “There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.”

Important Takeaways:

  • ‘On the way to food catastrophe’: What the growing population means for world hunger
  • The World Food Program warns every night around 828 million people go to bed hungry
  • Since 2019, the number of people facing significant food insecurity has increased from 135 million to 345 million, according to WFP.
  • Meanwhile world population is expected to reach 8 billion this week
  • “We are on the way to a raging food catastrophe,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders at the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, this week. “People in five separate places are facing famine.”
  • “When you look at the food price crisis, it’s particularly foods that are nutritious and are high in vitamins and minerals that these children need that are the most costly,” Saskia Osendarp, executive director of the Micronutrient Forum
  • “We call this hidden hunger because you don’t immediately notice it, but you do see it in individuals that lack these critical vitamins”

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NATO allies struggle to keep Kabul airport open for aid after withdrawal

By Stephanie Nebehay and Orhan Coskun

GENEVA/ANKARA (Reuters) – NATO allies are struggling to ensure that Afghanistan’s main gateway, Kabul airport, remains open for urgently needed humanitarian aid flights next week when they end their evacuation airlifts and turn it over to the Taliban.

The airport, a lifeline for tens of thousands of evacuees fleeing victorious Taliban fighters in the last two weeks and for aid arriving to relieve the impact of drought and conflict, was hit by a deadly attack outside its gates on Thursday.

Turkey said it was still talking to the Taliban about providing technical help to operate the airport after the Aug. 31 deadline for troops to leave Afghanistan but said the bombing underlined the need for a Turkish force to protect any experts deployed there.

Turkey has not said whether the Taliban would accept such a condition, and President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday his country was “not in a rush to start flights” again to Kabul.

But aid groups say there is an urgent need to maintain humanitarian deliveries to a country suffering its second drought in four years and where 18 million people, nearly half the population, depend on life-saving assistance.

The World Food Program said this week that millions of people in Afghanistan were “marching towards starvation” as the COVID-19 pandemic and this month’s upheaval, on top of the existing hardships, drive the country to catastrophe.

The World Health Organization warned on Friday that medical supplies in Afghanistan would run out in days, with little chance of re-stocking them.

“Right now because of security concerns and several other operational considerations, Kabul airport is not going to be an option for the next week at least,” said WHO regional emergency director Rick Brennan.

Brennan said the organization hoped to operate flights in the next few days into Afghanistan’s northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif with the support of Pakistani authorities.

“One of the challenges we have in Afghanistan right now is there is no civil aviation authority functioning,” he told a briefing from Cairo.

Insurance rates for flying into Afghanistan had “skyrocketed at prices we have never seen before” since Thursday’s attack, he added. “Once we have addressed that we will hopefully be airborne in the next 48 to 72 hours.”

LAST FLIGHTS

The United States says the Islamist Taliban movement had indicated “in no uncertain terms” that it wants to have a functioning commercial airport to avoid international isolation.

“A functioning state, a functioning economy, a government that has some semblance of a relationship with the rest of the world, needs a functioning commercial airport,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said. “We are in discussions with the Taliban on this very front.”

On Friday the Pentagon said several nations were willing to work with the Taliban to keep Kabul airport operating.

Still, as aid groups struggle to keep supply routes into the country open after the Aug. 31 departure of foreign troops, Afghans trying to leave the country are finding the few remaining exits slamming shut.

Several European Union countries say they have ended evacuation operations from Kabul, and the United States has said that by Monday it will prioritize the removal of its last troops and military equipment.

Germany ended evacuation flights on Thursday, although its former envoy to Afghanistan, Markus Potzel, has been in talks with the Taliban representative in Doha to keep Kabul airport operating after Aug. 31.

Potzel said on Wednesday he had been assured by the Taliban that Afghans “with legal documents will continue to have the opportunity to travel on commercial flights after 31 August.”

(Additional reporting by Emma Farge in Geneva and Ali Kucukgocmen in Istanbul; Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by Edmund Blair)

WFP says communities on verge of starvation in Madagascar after drought

NAIROBI (Reuters) – Communities in Madagascar are on the verge of starvation, with women and children walking for hours to reach food after the worst drought in four decades devastated the south of the island, the World Food Program said.

Acute malnutrition has almost doubled over the last four months, the WFP said, with more than a quarter of people suffering in one area.

“I met women and children who were holding on for dear life, they’d walked for hours to get to our food distribution points,” David Beasley, WFP executive director, said in a statement.

“There have been back-to-back droughts in Madagascar which have pushed communities right to the very edge of starvation. Families are suffering and people are already dying from severe hunger,” he added. Beasley blamed climate change for the crisis.

WFP said $78.6 million was needed to fight the crisis.

“Families have been living on raw red cactus fruits, wild leaves and locusts for months now,” Beasley said.

Bole, a mother of three from Ambiriky, in southern Madagascar, who also is caring for two orphans after their mother died, told the agency that to survive they relied on cactus leaves for their meals.

“We have nothing left. Their mother is dead and my husband is dead. What do you want me to say? Our life is all about looking for cactus leaves again and again to survive,” she said.

(Writing by Omar Mohammed; Editing by Alison Williams)