SANA’A (Al Jazeera) – The World Food Programme (WFP) has announced further dramatic cuts to food aid in Yemen, leaving millions of Yemenis already suffering through a Saudi-led war unable to get enough food.
The WFP said that it was forced into the rationing as a result of not receiving enough funding, global economic conditions and the continued knock-on effects of the conflict in Ukraine.
The WFP provides food aid to 13 million people in Yemen, but the new cuts mean it will only be able to provide five million of them with 50 percent of their daily food requirements, with the remaining eight million only getting 25 percent.
Caught between a protracted war and economic collapse, at least 17.4 million people – more than half of Yemen’s population – are in need of food assistance.
“Critical funding gaps, global inflation and the knock-on effects of the war in #Ukraine have forced @WFP in #Yemen to make some extremely tough decisions about the support we provide to our beneficiaries,” the organization said on Twitter.
The WFP, which is the food-assistance branch of the United Nations (UN) added that “resilience and livelihood activities, and school feeding and nutrition programs” would be cut for four million people, leaving it available for only 1.8 million people.
Saudi Arabia launched the devastating war on Yemen in March 2015 in collaboration with its Arab allies and with arms and logistics support from the U.S. and other Western states.
The objective was to reinstall the Riyadh-friendly regime of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crush the Ansarullah resistance movement, which has been running state affairs in the absence of a functional government in Yemen.
While the Saudi-led coalition has failed to meet any of its objectives, the war has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and spawned the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Some 19 million people in Yemen are projected to be in need of food assistance in 2022, an increase from the current 17.4 million. Of these, 7.3 million people will be facing emergency levels of hunger.
According to the UN children’s fund (UNICEF), about 2.3 million children under the age of five currently suffer from acute malnutrition in Yemen, with 400,000 expected to suffer from life-threatening severe malnutrition in the coming months.