Hundreds of thousands of children facing starvation in Yemen

16/7/2012 -


Source: Associated Press

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) says that hundreds of thousands of children are facing starvation in Yemen, with one (m) million children acutely malnourished.

"Close to sixty percent of Yemeni children under the age of five today are suffering from chronic malnutrition," UNICEF representative Gert Kapelari said.

"That makes Yemen the country with the highest level of chronic malnutrition in the world after Afghanistan."

Kapelari says that poses huge problems for Yemen's future.

250,000 children today in Yemen are at risk of dying or having life long consequences if we don't act immediately," he said.

At Revolution Hospital in the capital Sanaa, emaciated children lie on hospital beds, their bones jutting out.

Aid agencies say the country is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster, suffering from chronic levels of poverty.

Oxfam's Joy Singhal said that forty-four percent of the population - around 10 million people - are going hungry.

Singhal says more and more people are finding it difficult to afford to buy food, a knock-on effect of increasing levels of unemployment and rising prices.

Yemen imports up to 90 percent of its main staple foods, including wheat and sugar, which many households struggle to purchase.

Conflict and political instability have also played a factor, greatly increasing the number of internally displaced people who are now dependent on food aid.

According to the World Food Programme, 670-thousand IDPs rely on food aid in the south and north of the country.

In March, the WFP reported that levels of food insecurity in Yemen had doubled since 2009.

The European Union recently said it would provide an extra five million euros (six million US dollars) in humanitarian aid, to help combat a food crisis which could destabilise the conflict-torn country.