One million Yemeni
children face severe malnutrition within months as families struggle to pay for
food in one of the Arab world's poorest countries, the U.N. World Food
Programme has warned.
Political turmoil has pushed Yemen to
the brink of a humanitarian crisis and aid agencies estimate half the country's
24 million people are malnourished.
Protests last year that forced former
President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down pushed up food prices and
unemployment to an estimated half of the labour force, up from about a third in
2010, as foreign aid fell to a trickle, according to economists and aid groups.
The price of basic commodities such
as rice jumped by as much as 60 percent, they said.
"Even
graver than the situation of food security is clearly the nutrition situation
where we estimate that potentially one million children are at the risk of
becoming acutely malnourished in the coming months," WFP Deputy Executive
Director Ramiro Lopes Da Silva told Reuters in an interview late on Wednesday.
"Whilst
we have a food security issue, you have food in the markets. So, the issue is
not an issue of availability, the issue is an issue of access because a large
segment of the population does not have the purchasing power," he said.
Severe, or acute, malnutrition is
marked by severe wasting in children, according to the World Health
Organization. If the condition worsens, it could lead to death.
Aid agencies warn that the $4 billion
in aid pledged in May by Yemen's Gulf Arab neighbours and Western countries to
support a political pact forged after the country teetered on the edge of civil
war is not enough.
That pact saw Saleh, the country's
ruler for more than three decades, give way to his deputy Abd-Rabbu Mansour
Hadi in February, after a 14-month revolt that allowed Islamist militants to
seize control of parts of southern Yemen.
"There
has been political turmoil for the past one-and-a-half years that has resulted
in electricity supply shortage, resulting in an increase in fuel prices,"
Joy Singhal, Oxfam's deputy director in Yemen, said on Wednesday.
