Yemen is the country most at risk of a humanitarian catastrophe in 2021, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has warned, marking the third year running the war-ravaged nation has earned the grim recognition. Continued conflict, widespread hunger and a collapsing international aid response threaten to dramatically worsen the current crisis in Yemen next year, the IRC said.
The number of people facing the second-highest level of food insecurity in Yemen is set to increase from 3.6 million people to 5 million in the first half of 2021, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned. Yemen, which since 2014 has been gripped by a war between Iran-backed Huthi rebels and a beleaguered government supported by a Saudi-led military coalition, faces the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. “Pockets of famine-like conditions have already returned for the first time in two years,” WFP said in a statement. “The number of people experiencing this degree of catastrophic food insecurity could nearly triple from 16,500 currently to 47,000 people between January and June 2021.”
Tamuna Sabadze, the aid agency’s director for Yemen, said support was critical, now more “than ever”. In an interview with Al Jazeera from the capital, Sanaa, she called for “more commitment than we see today” from internal, regional and global actors to end the conflict. “Without this, things will not change in Yemen; the ordinary civilians of Yemen will really have no future and no hope. “Twenty-four million people are in need of some kind of humanitarian aid – be it food, protection, health services, or education. “The majority of the country really needs the UN and humanitarian funding in order to meet their basic day-to-day needs.”
The list also named ten more countries, but without being able to ascertain the intensity – Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Colombia, Lebanon, Mali, Niger, Palestine, Somalia, and Sudan, in that order. The country has not been receiving much financial aid, with the UN warning in November that the country had received less than half of the emergency funds required this year. The country has received $1.5 billion in donations, roughly 45 per cent of the $3.4 billion required. Around this time in 2019, Yemen had received $3 billion. The UN has earlier said that 80 per cent of Yemen’s 30 million population require aid and protection. The organisation also claimed that 13.5 Yemenis are facing acute shortages in food, while 16,500 are living in conditions akin to a famine.
