Yemen food crisis partly a war tactic, UN says

NEW YORK - 2 August 2017: The crisis in Yemen that has left millions hungry and on the brink of famine is “a man-made disaster” driven in part by an economic strangulation being used as a tactic of war, Daily Mail quoted a UN development chief as having said.

Auke Lootsma said “there is no end in sight” to Yemen’s civil war and about 70% of the country’s 27 million people need humanitarian aid, 60% do not know where their next meal is coming from, and nearly 7 million “are close to slipping into a state of famine”.

The UN has recorded almost 400,000 cases of cholera and nearly 1,900 related deaths in the past four months – and in the last two weeks there has been a meningitis outbreak.

Speaking from Yemen’s capital Sanaa, Lootsma said that nearly two million children are “acutely malnourished” which makes them susceptible to cholera.

“We expect this cholera outbreak to continue to wreak havoc despite the best efforts of the UN agencies” and humanitarian agencies working on the ground, said Lootsma, the UN Development Program’s country director in Yemen.

Yemen is like “a bus racing towards the end of a cliff,” he said. “Instead of hitting the brakes and turning around, the one that controls the bus keeps going and pushes the accelerator, all but certain to crash.”

But, he added, “I think we can still stop this bus and turn it around before it goes over the cliff, but time is really running out, and it’s really running out to find the brakes, and stop this from happening.”