Salem, 5, who suffers from malnutrition, lies on a bed at a hospital in the port city of Hodeidah, southwest of Sanaa, Yemen. (AP Photo)
According to a report that was published on Thursday by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), seven million people in Yemen are on the verge of starvation, while 2.3 million children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition.
The Paris Agreement on climate change, signed in November 2016, was the first time all the world’s nations (except Nicaragua and Syria) signed up to reduce emissions and cap man-made global warming.
Auke Lootsma, the country director of the UN Development Program said via a video link on Tuesday that the UN has been facing problems delivering aid to Yemen due to the lack of cooperation from the Saudi-led coalition.
The UN operates two flights into Yemen’s Houthi held capital city Sanaa to deliver aid, from Amman and Djibouti.
Most of us living in the West have never known hunger. In America, food shelves are easily accessed by the most vulnerable of society.
Despite living in a time where there is a global surplus of food, millions of people around the world are still suffering from famine. If you follow mainstream media coverage about these humanitarian disasters, they’re most likely presented through the lens of climate change, high food prices and taxes.
I come and stand at every door
But none shall hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
— Nazim Hikmet, I Come and Stand at Every Door
A girl is treated for a suspected cholera infection at a hospital in Sanaa, Yemen. The World Health Organization says a rapidly spreading cholera outbreak in Yemen has claimed thousands of lives since April and is suspected of affecting 246,000 people. (AP/Hani Mohammed)
Yemen is suffering from the world’s largest cholera epidemic on record, Oxfam said on Friday morning.
A Somali woman walks through a camp of people displaced from their homes elsewhere in the country by the drought, shortly after dawn in Qardho, Somalia Thursday, March 9, 2017. (AP/Ben Curtis)
SYDNEY — In a part of the world where little attention is given beyond the briefest of news flashes, there is an ongoing famine impacting countless lives. Spurred in part by both drought and war, a famine is now casting its long shadow over millions of people across the Middle East and many parts of Africa.
A young boy who lost his leg in the Saudi war in Yemen war uses a prosthetic limb at a government-run rehabilitation center in Sanaa, Yemen, March 5, 2016. (AP Photo)
A South Sudanese refugee sits on a mat outside a communal tent with his brother at the Imvepi reception center, where newly arrived refugees are processed in northern Uganda Friday, June 9, 2017. (AP/Ben Curtis)
“[Famine] seems to be the last, most dreadful resource of nature…the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to provide subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
– Thomas Malthus, “Essay on Population”
The United Nations has warned that by summer’s end, if the Saudi blockade of Yemen continues, the resulting man-made famine could put 300,000 Yemeni people at risk of cholera. This was conveyed in a statement by Meritxell Relano of the United Nations’ Children’s Agency.
Currently there are 193,000 known cases of the disease in Yemen with 1,265 reported. Many of these deaths are children.
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