WFP says Yemen's food security could collapse as three in four households go short

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GENEVA, Switzerland — The UN World Food Programme said fighting in Yemen could collapse the country’s food security, with almost three in four households unable to meet their basic food needs.

Matthew Hollingworth, the agency’s assistant executive director for programme operations, gave the assessment on Friday.

He briefed reporters in Geneva by video link from Rome.

“Almost three out of four households are unable to meet their basic food needs today,” Hollingworth said. “That’s a record number for this year.”

He said the latest escalation in the fighting threatened to be “absolutely devastating” for food security.

“We are looking at a hunger crisis that is going to grow as it persists,” he said.

Hollingworth said Yemenis were skipping meals and eating a much smaller diversity of food types. He said many were finding it hard to put any food on the table.

The agency put the number of people facing acute food insecurity across Yemen at 18.3 million. It said 2.2 million children under five were acutely malnourished, 500,000 of them severely.

More than 152,000 people have been displaced in recent weeks, according to the agency. It said it had reached more than 70,000 of them with assistance in Taiz and Lahj.

The UN migration agency counted more than 149,000 people displaced by the renewed fighting. Many of them had been displaced at least once before, it said.

The programme assists 2.4 million people in areas held by the internationally recognised government. About 10 million people live in those areas.

It said about 350,000 people could not be reached because of fighting in Taiz and Hodeidah.

September brought the agency’s largest distributions of ready-to-eat food this year, it said.

Hollingworth said the agency needed $109 million to deliver emergency food and nutrition aid to as many as 1.5 million people.

A further $158 million would sustain operations for 2.4 million people through March 2027, the agency said. It put its total requirement at about $250 million, half of it needed at once.

It said stocks already inside the country could reach 1.5 million people if the fighting widened.

Wheat flour prices in Taiz rose 10 percent in two weeks, according to the agency’s market monitoring. It estimated the country’s wheat stocks at about two months of demand.

The agency attributed the deterioration to rising food prices and to disruption of the shipping routes Yemen depends on. Yemen imports about 90 percent of its food.

The account of the briefing rests on the World Food Programme’s own statements and data. No independent assessment of its findings has been published.

The agency said 73 UN staff were being held by Houthi authorities, 38 of them its own employees. It called for their immediate and unconditional release.

The Houthi authorities had made no public comment on the hunger warning at the time of writing.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification put 5 million people in government-controlled areas in crisis or worse between March and May. It placed 1.4 million of them in the emergency phase, the step below famine.

One in two people in those areas faced high levels of acute food insecurity, that analysis said.

It projected 5.4 million people in crisis or worse from June to September, and the same number from October to December.

The June-to-September projection put 1.6 million people in the emergency phase. The classification covered government-controlled areas only, and its authors described it as a partial picture of the country.

It expected conditions to worsen through the lean season, when household stocks run down before the harvest.

The UN humanitarian plan for Yemen, issued in March, counted more than 22 million people in need of assistance. It recorded 516,157 children with severe acute malnutrition.

The plan counted 5.2 million people displaced inside the country. It sought $2.16 billion to reach 12 million people this year.

Fighting between Houthi forces and forces of the internationally recognised government has intensified since July, according to UN briefings in Geneva.

At one of those briefings, on Sept. 18, the International Organization for Migration said more than 112,000 people had been displaced in two weeks.

It said the movement covered Aden, Hudaydah, Abyan and Taiz, and that 4.8 million people were already displaced before it began.

“Our resources are very, very, very limited and our stocks will be depleted very soon,” said Abdusattor Esoev, the organisation’s chief of mission in Yemen.

Aid agencies at that briefing said health facilities, water systems and schools had been damaged or closed in the governorates worst affected by the fighting.

The UN human rights office, the UN population fund, the refugee agency and the World Health Organization also briefed reporters on Yemen that day.

Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, deputy executive director of UN Women, told the same briefing that women and girls made up more than 57 percent of those at risk of food insecurity in Yemen.

The briefing was told that 11.7 million women and girls across 28 countries affected by escalation in the Middle East could face food insecurity by the end of the year.

More than 3,700 people had crossed the Bab al-Mandab strait from Yemen to Djibouti by late September, the migration agency said.