EXCLUSIVE: Russia’s war in Ukraine has sparked a global crisis, and experts warn that hunger poses the greatest worldwide security threat as millions face famine and starvation.

“The conflict in Ukraine isn’t just increasing hunger conditions within the country or even within the region,” Steve Taravella, senior spokesperson for the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), told Fox News. “The number of people who are on the brink of famine is now about 48.9 million in 43 countries.

“That is really dramatic.”

Taravella said that roughly three-quarters of a million people are facing starvation in just five nations across the globe, including Ethiopia, Yemen, South Sudan, Afghanistan and Somalia.

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“These aren’t people who just don’t know where their next meal is coming from,” he continued. “These are people who are really facing starvation.”

These highly vulnerable nations have been embroiled in brutal conflicts, which has not only made providing humanitarian care more difficult but has also stunted global production.

“The link between conflict and hunger is really essential for understanding what is happening in Ukraine,” Taravella said. “Bottom line: When people are fighting they’re not farming.”

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Global drought and the coronavirus pandemic had already created serious hunger conditions for the most vulnerable nations, but Russia’s war in the grain-rich sector of the world has pushed dangerous conditions into catastrophic realities.

“Hunger is soaring to terrifying levels, and the global situation just keeps on getting worse. Conflict, the climate crisis, COVID and surging food and fuel costs have created a perfect storm — and now the Ukraine war is piling catastrophe on top of catastrophe,” David Beasley, head of the U.N. WFP, tweeted this week.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres echoed these comments last month when he told the Biden administration that global hunger levels had reached “a new high.”

“In just two years, the number of severely food insecure people has doubled, from 135 million pre-pandemic to 276 million today,” he said. “More than half a million people are living in famine conditions — an increase of more than 500% since 2016.”

But Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought a new reality to the alarming situation.

“It’s a global storm with a global impact,” Taravella explained.

In 2019, Ukraine provided a staggering 42% of the world’s sunflower oil. In addition, it also provided 16% of the world’s corn exports, 10% of all barley exports, and nearly 9% of all wheat exports also came from Ukraine.

Kyiv also contributed 40% of all wheat exports the WFP received to assist vulnerable nations worldwide before it became the target of a deadly conflict.

As much as 25 million tons of grain remain holed up in storage facilities in Ukraine as Russian naval vessels hold an export blockade over ports located along the Black Sea.

Taravella explained that not only is there an urgent need to distribute the grain to assist with food demands now, but its circulation is also needed to ensure that any current grain harvesting can be stored.

Food prices have risen worldwide, but countries with the lowest GPD index will see the greatest spikes in costs at the market.

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“The people who now have to cough up the dramatically greater amounts of money for food are the very people who can least afford it,” the WFP official told Fox News.

This is largely due to the fact that countries in the Middle East and Africa have been highly reliant on Ukrainian exports and food assistance programs like the WFP – which is also incurring substantially greater costs.

Before the war, Lebanon received 80% of its wheat imports from Ukraine while Tunisia, Libya and Pakistan all received nearly 50% of their wheat needs from the former Soviet nation.

Iraq imported nearly 88% of its sunflower oil from Ukraine, while India and Egypt relied upon Ukraine for 76% and 54% of their sunflower oil needs, respectively.

Experts are concerned the food crisis will not only lead to a spike in global hunger but pose a major security threat worldwide.

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“One of the drivers of the conflict in what we now call the Arab Spring was the inability to get affordable food. When people are hungry, they become desperate and they turn to desperate measures,” Taravella said. “We are all very nervous that as the numbers of hungry grow around the world, political instability could grow with it.

“The last thing the world needs is more conflict. How many more countries in conflict can the world sustain?”

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/russia-global-food-crisis-49-million-famine-starvation-expert

The post Russia-induced global food crisis pushes 49M to ‘brink’ of famine, starvation: expert warns first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

“Some will be in critical, life threatening situations,” Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, coordinator in the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian affairs, said of the affected people.

“We’re now going out on the ground, dropping people off from helicopters to determine what the critical needs are.”

Idai flattened homes and provoked widespread flooding after slamming into Mozambique near the port of Beira on March 14. It then ripped through neighbouring Zimbabwe and Malawi, killing at least 686 people across the three southern African countries.

Mozambique – which has a population of around 30 million – was hit hardest, with tens of thousands of homes destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced across an area of some 3,000 square km (1,200 square miles) – roughly the size of Luxembourg.

Receding flood waters have allowed greater access, and a greater sense of how much people have lost. Thousands of people, stranded for more than a week by the flooding, are now being moved to safer shelters.

Increasingly, the relief focus has turned to preventing or containing what many believe will be inevitable outbreaks of malaria and cholera.

Though no cholera cases have yet been confirmed, health workers on the ground have reported an upsurge in cases of diarrhoea – a symptom of the disease.

“We are testing as we go,” said Rob Holden, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) incident manager in the capital Maputo. “But nonetheless we are treating acute watery diarrhoea, it’s the same as treating cholera. That’s just the diagnosis.”

BIG, DENSE POPULATION

Dozens of people queued in front of a clinic in Beira’s Munhava district on Tuesday, as nurses wearing surgical masks out a chlorine solution to prevent the spread of diseases like cholera.

“There is a big population, dense population in Beira,” said Gert Verdonck, emergency coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). “Of course any spread of any kind of epidemic will be a lot quicker here.”

The WHO is dispatching 900,000 doses of oral cholera vaccine from a global stockpile. The shipment is expected to arrive within 10 days, and a first round of vaccinations will target 100,000 people.

Cholera is spread by faeces in sewage-contaminated water or food, and outbreaks can develop quickly in a humanitarian crisis where sanitation systems are disrupted. It can kill within hours if left untreated.

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) has designated Mozambique a level three emergency, placing it on a par with Syria, Yemen and South Sudan. The agency is preparing to feed 1.7 million people in Mozambique.

The U.N. is appealing for $282 million to fund the first three months of the disaster response in Mozambique, and a total of $337 million. So far, only 2 percent of that amount has been funded.

SEARCHING THROUGH RUBBLE

In Zimbabwe, where 179 people have died, another 329 people were still unaccounted for on Monday.

In hard-hit Chimanimani district, villagers used hoes and shovels to dig through debris on Tuesday and search for missing relatives believed buried by the mudslides unleashed by the cyclone.

One family has spent a week digging day and night for four relatives, in what was once a settlement of 500 people but has been reduced to rubble.

Large rocks, some more than two metres (six feet) high, which rolled from a nearby mountain at high speed are what remains after the storm swept away a police camp, houses and an open market.

“I am an orphan now and I am so much in pain because I lost my brother who looked after me. He was more of a father to me,” said Sarah Sithole, 32, whose policeman brother was washed away while on night duty at the police station.

“We will continue searching until we find him and bury him. We will not rest,” she said, her hands and feet covered with red soil.

Around 95 percent of roads in affected districts have been damaged, impeding access to rescuers with earth moving equipment. Zimbabwe has requested for search dogs from South Africa to help look for those missing, a local government official said.

The WFP said it will aim to distribute food assistance to 732,000 people in Malawi and 270,000 in Zimbabwe.

The post Nearly 2 million Mozambicans in need after cyclone -UN first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.