Los Angeles, September 06: A top humanitarian official of the United Nations (UN) has written a letter to the Security Council alerting that the crisis arising from the Corona pandemic has created famine in Yemen, South Sudan, northeast Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Last month, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a statement saying that nearly 130 million people in 25 countries including Bangladesh, Western Africa, Latin America, Central Asia are starving due to the Corona pandemic, including the above four countries.
In a letter to all fifteen members of the United Nations Security Council, Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lovelock said the famine threat in these areas was exacerbated by “natural disasters, economic shocks and public health crises” by the Covid-19 disease.
They have said, ‘This has endangered the lives of millions of women, men and children. “So updates are needed when there is a” risk of conflict-induced famine and widespread food insecurity “.
UN officials of all four regions have previously stated that the food crisis is in the grip of chronic armed conflicts and the inability of humanitarian relief providers to freely distribute aid. But the complications caused by the pandemic now pushed them closer to famine conditions.
Last April, David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program (United Nations Anti-Starvation Campaign), warned the Security Council that “we are on the verge of a hunger” amid the Corona pandemic.
In July, their program identified 25 countries that were prepared to face devastating levels of hunger due to the highly transmissible disease.
Lovelock’s new warning of the upcoming famine effectively increases those alerts. This is the fifth phase of a famine under a monitoring system to assess hunger emergencies. It has been identified as the “level of starvation, death, destruction and extremely severe acute malnutrition”.
