More than ten million children, especially in the Horn of Africa and South Asia, are at risk from acute malnutrition, UNICEF reports Tuesday. The ongoing drought, the war in Ukraine and the aftermath of the corona pandemic are the main causes, according to the UN children’s organization.
According to the children’s organization, at least 13.6 million children under the age of five worldwide currently suffer from acute malnutrition.
In the Horn of Africa, the number of severely malnourished children will rise from 1.7 million to 2 million in the short term, the UN children’s organization expects. But the numbers are also very worrying in regions such as South Asia, UNICEF said in a report published Tuesday.
The organization points out that at least ten million severely malnourished children do not have access to the right treatment. The costs of the therapeutic food that the children receive are increasing due to rising food prices.
This puts the lives of another 600,000 children at risk, UNICEF reports. The organization calls on governments and donors to come up with extra money. “We need to act quickly,” says director Catherine Russell. “There is very little time left before this situation gets much, much worse.”
Horn of Africa worst drought in 40 years
The UN emergency aid agency already sounded the alarm at the end of April because of the serious situation in the Horn of Africa. According to UN World Food Program WFP, about 13 million people in parts of Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya are starving as a result.
The East African region, which also includes Eritrea and Djibouti, is being ravaged by the worst drought in forty years. In the past three rainy seasons, there has been so little rainfall in these areas that many more livestock die than usual and crops are unable to grow. The drought forces people to move to other areas, causing conflict.
Global food aid at risk from war in Ukraine
Ports and sea routes have been blocked as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As a result, millions of tons of food in Ukraine are currently unusable.
Until the beginning of the war, Ukraine was one of the world’s major producers of wheat and a major producer of maize. For example, according to UN figures, more than 30 million tons of corn and nearly 25 million tons of wheat were harvested in the country in 2020.
Many countries in North Africa, for example, depend on cheap wheat from Ukraine. The grain is also crucial to global food aid. That is now in danger, the UN warned in early May.