The UN has been forced to cut food, cash payments and assistance to millions of people in many countries because of “a crippling funding crisis” that has seen its donations plummet by about half as acute hunger is hitting record levels, a top official said on Friday.
World Food Programme (WFP) Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau told a news conference that at least 38 of the 86 countries where the program operates have already seen cuts or plan to cut assistance soon — including Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and West Africa.
He said that WFP’s operating requirement is US$20 billion to deliver aid to everyone in need, but it was aiming for between US$10 billion and US$14 billion, which was what the agency had received in the past few years.
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“We’re still aiming at that, but we have only so far this year gotten to about half of that, around $5 billion,” Skau said.
He said that humanitarian needs were “going through the roof” in 2021 and last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine and its global implications.
“Those needs continue to grow, those drivers are still there, but the funding is drying up. So we’re looking at 2024 [being] even more dire,” he said.
“The largest food and nutrition crisis in history today persists,” Skau said. “This year, 345 million people continue to be acutely food insecure while hundreds of millions of people are at risk of worsening hunger.”
Conflict and insecurity remain the primary drivers of acute hunger around the world, along with climate change, unrelenting disasters, persistent food price inflation and mounting debt stress — all during a slowdown in the global economy, he said.
WFP is looking to diversify its funding base, but he also urged the agency’s traditional donors to “step up and support us through this very difficult time.”
Asked why funding was drying up, Skau said to ask the donors.
“But it’s clear that aid budgets, humanitarian budgets, both in Europe and the United States, [are] not where they were in 2021-2022,” he said.
Skau said that in March, the program was forced to cut rations from 75 percent to 50 percent for communities in Afghanistan facing emergency levels of hunger, and in May it was forced to cut food for 8 million people — 66 percent of the people it was assisting.
Now, it is helping just 5 million people, he said.
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