The United Nations World Food Programme has called for unimpeded access to families trapped in encircled cities and conflict zones in Ukraine, which is now the world's fastest-growing humanitarian crisis.
“We’re calling on everyone to give us the access we need to reach the people in besieged cities,” WFP Executive Director David Beasley said at the end of a three-day visit to Ukraine on Friday.
“It’s one thing when people are suffering from the devastation of war. It’s another thing when they’re being starved to death," he underlined.
The encircled city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine is thought to be running out of its last reserves of food and water and over 100,000 people are believed to be trapped there, WFP warned in its statement.
No humanitarian aid has been allowed into the city since it was encircled more than two weeks ago. To the west of Mariupol, the city of Mykolaev remains unreachable due to warfare in the area, and WFP is also concerned about several cities in eastern Ukraine, said the statement.
WFP has so far delivered food assistance to 1.4 million people in Ukraine and is ramping up to reach 2.3 million people this month. This week the UN agency stepped up food assistance operations to areas which until recently were on the war’s front lines, according to the statement.
In war-ravaged towns such as Bucha, Hostomel, Borodyanka and Irpin, near Kyiv, WFP is now distributing boxes of pasta, rice, canned meat and cooking oil to traumatized survivors amid the rubble of their former homes, the statement said.
WFP chief Beasley went to Bucha on Thursday to see first-hand the operations being carried out in the area with the help of local church communities. He also spoke with women and children in a nearby centre for displaced people.
“I am shocked. The horror of war is so visible here and I shudder to think what these people have been through,” Beasley said after walking through streets littered with unexploded mortar shells and visiting a bombed out orphanage.
“But I see hope. I see a community working with energy to clean up and rebuild. We need to support that process,” he underlined.
WFP is scaling up its response to the conflict in Ukraine on a “no-regrets” basis, with the goal of eventually supporting 6 million people caught up in Russia's seven-week-old assault, the statement noted.
Families in conflict-hit areas are receiving food parcels similar to those distributed in Bucha. Meanwhile, in areas where markets are still functioning, cash is being distributed so families can buy what they need.
Over 7 million people are displaced inside Ukraine and WFP estimates one third of the population and more than half (60 percent) of internally displaced people are worried about finding enough to eat.
The conflict in Ukraine - a major exporter of grain - is also triggering a wave of hunger elsewhere in the world and global food prices have increased sharply since the start of the conflict and are now at an all-time high, WFP noted.
These price hikes are expected to further cut access to food for millions of people whose household budgets are already under pressure from food inflation in their countries.
