IDLIB (Al Jazeera) – The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is reducing life-saving food assistance to Syria from next month.
The UN agency has been forced to reduce data-x-items in its monthly emergency food basket due to funding constraints and skyrocketing food prices, which have been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and economic crisis in Syria.
“For northwest Syria this means, starting May 2022, the [food] basket will reduce from 1,300 to 1,170 [kilocalories] per person,” a WFP spokesperson, who asked that their name not be used, told Al Jazeera.
A local aid organization in the northwest also confirmed to Al Jazeera that the WFP had notified them of the food assistance cuts by email on April 8. The organization asked to remain unnamed as it was not authorized to comment on the status of UN programs.
The reduction means that needy families will receive the same amount of vegetable oil, wheat flour, salt, and sugar from the UN agency, but monthly quantities of lentils, chickpeas, rice, and bulgur wheat will be cut back. WFP had previously reduced the monthly food basket in September 2021.
Since the onset of the war in Ukraine, the price of vegetable oil has increased in Syria by 39 percent and wheat flour is up by 10 percent.
WFP said in February that 12 million people, 55 percent of the total population, are facing acute food insecurity in Syria due to the U.S. sanctions and the foreign-backed war, and in January the agency dispatched food and nutrition assistance to an estimated 5.5 million people across all its activities in the country.
About 1.35 million people in northwest Syria benefit from the WFP’s food basket program.
Khaled Abdulrahman has a family of nine and the WFP basket of food assistance provided for most of their food needs for half the month.
As his children played near their makeshift home in the Ahl al-Tah camp for internally displaced people in northern Idlib, Abdulrahman considered ways to provide for his family now that their food supply faces cutbacks.