Four United Nations agencies warned on Friday that severe malnutrition threatens the lives of half of the children under the age of five in Yemen during the year 2021.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations “FAO”, the United Nations Children’s Fund “UNICEF”, the World Food Program, and the World Health Organization have predicted that nearly 2.3 million children under five in Yemen will suffer from acute malnutrition during the current year, of which 400 thousand children are threatened with malnutrition. Severe acute feeding and the possibility of death if they do not receive treatment urgently.
In a joint press release, it indicated that there was an increase in the rates of acute and severe malnutrition by 16 percent and 22 percent, respectively, among children under the age of five for the year 2020.
The United Nations agencies warned that these numbers were among the highest rates of severe acute malnutrition recorded in Yemen since the conflict escalated in 2015.
It also predicted that about 1.2 million pregnant or breastfeeding women in Yemen will suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.
“The increasing number of children who suffer from hunger in Yemen should push us all to act,” UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta H. Fore said. “More children will die with each passing day without doing the necessary work.”
For his part, Executive Director of the Food Program, David Beasley, stressed that these numbers represent another call for help from Yemen, as every child suffering from malnutrition also means there is a family struggling to survive.
“The crisis in Yemen is a lethal combination of conflict, economic collapse, and acute shortage of funding necessary to provide life-saving assistance that is urgently needed,” he said, “but there is a solution to hunger, which is the availability of food and the cessation of violence. If we act now, there is still time to end the suffering.” Children of Yemen. “