The United Nations World Food Programme is swiftly scaling up its "already sizeable" emergency operation in Zimbabwe, where drought, flooding and economic meltdown have left half the population - 7.7 million people - facing severe hunger, WFP said Tuesday.
We’re deep into a vicious cycle of sky-rocketing malnutrition that’s hitting women and children hardest and will be tough to break,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley.
“With poor rains forecast yet again in the run-up to the main harvest in April, the scale of hunger in the country is going to get worse before it gets better,” he added.
WFP said it plans to more than double by January the number of people it is helping to 4.1 million, providing life-saving rations of cereal, pulses and vegetable oil and a protective nutrition ration for under-fives.
Zimbabwe’s hunger crisis - the worst for more than a decade - is part of an unprecedented climate-driven disaster gripping southern Africa, WFP said. Temperatures in the region are rising at more than twice the average global rate and ever more erratic rainy seasons are hitting the country’s subsistence farmers hard, WFP noted.
The crisis is being worsened by a dire shortage of foreign currency, runaway inflation, rising unemployment, fuel shortages, prolonged power outages and large-scale livestock losses, problems that are afflicting urban and rural populations alike.
The limited availability of Zimbabwean dollars and surging prices for basic goods, which presage a near wholesale switch from cash assistance to food distributions, make WFP’s planned scale-up "a huge logistical undertaking," it said.
WFP plans to source, purchase and deliver to the land-locked country over 40,000 metric tons of commodities through June, a challenge made all the more daunting because climate shocks have eroded food supplies across much of Africa, the UN agency said.
An estimated 293 million dollars is required for WFP’s emergency response with less than 30 percent of that sum secured, the agency underlined.
“We urge the international community to step up funding to address the root causes of long-term hunger in Zimbabwe,” said Beasley.
“We must not let our immediate focus on emergency aid distract us from investing in the resilience programs that will help chronically hungry people cope with the ever-more severe impacts of erratic weather."
