An annual report released by the Global Network against Food Crises warns that the number of people facing acute food insecurity and needing urgent life- and livelihood-saving assistance hit a five-year high in 2020 in countries beset by food crises.
In progress at UNHQ
Noon Briefings
The United Nations team in Madagascar is helping authorities to address record-high food insecurity and surging severe acute malnutrition caused by droughts, sandstorms and caterpillar plagues in the south of the island. Authorities and the United Nations launched a flash appeal in January for nearly $76 million.
The United Nations country team in Myanmar calls for the immediate release of dozens of journalists who are detained more than three months after the military seized control of the Government. To date, military authorities have revoked the operating licenses of six Myanmar media outlets; 82 journalists have been arrested, more than half of them are still detained.
Humanitarian workers in Sudan report that the security situation in the town of Ag Geneina in western Darfur is stable but remains tense and unpredictable. More than 230,000 people were displaced by the conflict in Darfur since the beginning of 2021, more than four times the 53,000 displaced in all of 2020.
Unrelenting drought in southern Madagascar is forcing hundreds of thousands of people to the brink of famine, the World Food Programme (WFP) reports. At least 1.35 million people need emergency food and nutrition assistance. Acute malnutrition in children under 5 has almost doubled over the last four months.
The Elsie Initiative, a United Nations Trust Fund that supports deployment of uniformed women to peace operations, announced this morning its first five recipients — Liberia, Mexico, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone — during a high-level virtual event. The Fund also launched its second programming round.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, with support from the World Health Organization and other partners, has launched a yellow fever vaccination campaign targeting more than 16.3 million people in the country, the first such drive against the disease in Africa this year.
Progress in protecting the world’s forests — and the people who rely on them — is at risk due to the devastating impacts of the coronavirus and the escalating climate and biodiversity crises, according to a new report released today by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
The first members of the International Organization for Migration’s emergency response team arrived in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines today to deliver essential shelter and emergency items to thousands of people forcibly displaced after the eruption of La Soufrière volcano.
The World Food Programme (WFP) said it will launch an operation to reach up to 2 million vulnerable people in Myanmar’s main cities and other areas where people have recently been uprooted. WFP estimates that 3.4 million more people will be hungry within the next six months, amid the ongoing effects of poverty, COVID-19 and political crisis.