UN says forced to cut Yemen rations, compounding food crisis

DUBAI: More than four million Yemenis will receive less food assistance as a result of funding shortages, compounding one of the world´s worst humanitarian crises, the UN´s food agency warned on Friday.

The World Food Programme said “a deeper funding crisis for its Yemen operations from the end of September onward... will force WFP to make difficult decisions about further cuts to our food assistance programmes across the country in the coming months.”

Without new funding, it expects more than four million people will receive less food assistance, many of them women and children already suffering from some of the highest malnutrition rates in the world.

With major cuts announced across different programmes, the actual number of people affected could be higher. “We are confronted with the incredibly tough reality of making decisions to take food from the hungry to feed the starving,” said Richard Ragan, WFP´s Yemen representative.

The UN agency was “fully cognisant of the suffering these cuts will cause”, he said in a statement. Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula´s poorest country, is already in the grips of one of the planet´s worst humanitarian crises after eight years of war, according to the United Nations.