Nearly half of Yemenis are food insecure

Doha: Declaring famine in a country or part of a country is a job that comes with great responsibility.

When discussing the food insecurity situation in Yemen, World Food Programme’s Endalkachew Alamnew repeatedly used the terms “severely food insecure” or “food emergency” and avoided the word “famine” despite the country being perilously close to it, according to recent reports.

“Malnutrition in Yemen is at the highest level since several years. Ten governorates in the country are currently facing a food emergency and if their problems are not resolved soon, they may be at a risk of extreme hunger,” the WFP’s Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping Officer for Yemen told Gulf News on the sidelines of the Yemen Humanitarian Crises Conference in Qatar last week.

The problem, according to him, has been ongoing ever since the 2011 revolution began to overthrow the government of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. The years of unrest kept worsening the situation and once the current crisis escalated last year, the cumulative effect of the conflict took its toll on Yemeni people, pushing the severely affected ones to the brink of famine.

“Malnutrition is a combination of two main factors: shortage of food intake and health-related problems or diseases,” he explained.

The ongoing conflict has rendered most parts of the country hit by multiple crises. While food shortage and the collapse of health facilities need to be addressed individually, these factors combine to cause dangerous levels of malnutrition. In Al Hodeidah governorate, the Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) rate has reached 31 per cent, which is much beyond the highest critical level as per the World Health Organisation’s classification.

Of the 26 million people in Yemen, 14.4 million have been labelled “food insecure” and nearly 8 million “severely food insecure” in the Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan document released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

To explain how much of a difference a year has made in terms of the numbers, Alamnew highlighted that estimates show an increase of about 5 million in the food insecure population.

Dr Tariq Noman, a cardiovascular surgeon based in Taiz, confirmed Alamnew’s analysis.

“Nobody is eating well in Yemen. The meals that we do eat, they are very poor meals,” Noman said while speaking about the conditions of doctors and volunteer staff working in the Al Houthi-besieged city.

According to Alamnew, deficiency of access to basic food commodities and lack of essential services are the chief causes of malnutrition and related problems in Yemen.

“The food that is coming into the country is in small quantities due to blockades, making it scarcely available in local markets, which makes the prices go up and unaffordable to the poor segment of the population.”

As most Yemenis rely on land and sea-based livelihood, the lack of access to their places of work or the scarcity of resources such as water, fuel and agricultural inputs have significantly reduced production of food crops and led to a drastic drop in income levels.

“There has been a shortage of rainfall as well in Yemen so you can say that even nature is not on their side, unfortunately,” Alamnew said.

While aid agencies have been attempting to help the population with severe food insecurity, they are faced with several challenges such as lack of access to affected areas due to insecurity and shortage of aid resources.

The basic and most urgent solution to the Yemeni population’s problems is halting the conflict, following which access to besieged areas can be made easier and helping people can turn into a reality as opposed to being only part of an aid agency’s plan.

The urgency in Alamnew’s tone and words reflected the critical needs of the people of Yemen.

“With 19 governorates severely affected by the crisis, urgent actions need to be taken now before it gets too late.”

-Hafsa Adil is a freelance journalist based in Doha