The United Nations is facing the “largest humanitarian crisis” of its more than 70 year history, a top U.N. official warned Friday after visiting four countries with high risk of famine.
More than 20 million people are vulnerable due to lack of food, disease and threat of war in Kenya, Yemen, South Sudan and Somalia, according to U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Stephen O’Brien.
He told the U.N. Security Council on Friday: “We stand at a critical point in history. Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the U.N.” The U.N. was created in 1945.
For three of the countries he visited, South Sudan, Yemen and Somalia, along with northeast Nigeria, O’Brien said an “immediate injection of funds plus safe and unimpeded access” are needed to avert catastrophe.
“[M]any people will predictably die from hunger, livelihoods will be lost, and political gains that have been hard won over the last few years will be reversed,” he said. “To be precise we need $4.4 billion by July, and that’s a detailed cost, not a negotiating number.”
In Yemen, where a civil war has been waged for the past couple of years, is already the “largest humanitarian crisis in the world,” O’Brien said.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, during an emergency visit to Somalia last week, also pushed for immediate international support to alleviate the country’s hunger crisis.
“We have 6.2 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in Somalia, that is almost half of the Somali population,” he said. A famine in that country killed 260,000 in 2011.
