UN chief asks world to help avert hunger catastrophe in Yemen

Donor countries should come to the rescue of the people of Yemen, where the war has helped create the world’s largest hunger crisis, UN Chief, Antonio Guterres, has said.

Guterres stated this on Tuesday at the start of an international pledging conference in Geneva.

The minister-level meeting was convened in Geneva because only 15 per cent of the 2.1 billion dollars that are needed to aid Yemen this year have been donated so far.

“We are witnessing the starving and the crippling of an entire generation. We must act now to save lives,” Guterres said.

The war that is now in its third year has left 17 million of the country’s 27 million people at risk of hunger.

On average, one child under the age of five dies every 10 minutes of preventable causes in Yemen, the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula.

Yemen’s conflict has regional and religious dimensions, pitting the Saudi-backed government against Iran-allied rebels who seized the capital, Sana’a and surrounding areas in late 2014.

The war has intensified since March, 2015, when Saudi Arabia and fellow Sunni Muslim countries began an air campaign against the rebels who follow the Shiite Muslim tradition that is also Iran’s state religion.

Two years on, 18.8 million Yemenis need humanitarian aid.
Even before the conflict escalated, Yemenis suffered.

“Fear, famine, poverty, cries of children are not new,” Yemen’s Prime Minister, Ahmed Obeid, said.

However, a large part of the country’s infrastructure has been destroyed by the war.

Less than 45 per cent of Yemen’s hospitals and clinics are fully functioning, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

“Conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer are killing more people than bullets and bombs,” WHO Director-General, Margaret Chan, said.