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	Food ration cuts are becoming the norm as aid agencies struggle to keep up with rising needs by WFP, UNHCR, IRC, agencies   Feb. 2019   Funding cuts deprives 120,000 children of school meals in drought-ridden Southern Madagascar (WFP)   Lack of funding for the UN World Food Programme's (WFP) school feeding operation in drought-ravaged southern Madagascar is threatening deeper hunger in the poorest parts of a country where one in two children are chronically malnourished.   Forty percent of the 300,000 primary school children in Anosy, Androy and Atsimo Andrefana regions who should receive a daily hot meal from WFP have had to go without since the start of the academic year last November, aggravating already low enrolment and high dropout rates.   For many recipients, the daily WFP meal, which consists of cereal, pulses and vegetable oil fortified with micronutrient powders, is their only one, and often a powerful incentive for parents to send their children to school instead of to work.   WFP is seeking just US$4 million to resume the provision of meals to those children presently missing out and ensure full implementation of its programme through July when the school year ends.   Although Madagascar has the world's fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition - 47 percent a mere seven percent of its children receive meals at school.   'It's beyond tragic that our already limited coverage has been further curtailed, depriving some of the country's most vulnerable children of essential help, even the prospect of a decent future', said Moumini Ouedraogo, WFP's Representative in Madagascar.   'It costs only US$50 to feed a child for a year. I appeal to the international community to promptly help us fully restore the programme'.   Recent research conducted by WFP and others shows that school feeding is not just an important social safety net, but also a high-return investment in human capital and local economies that disproportionately benefits the poor and malnourished.   Southern Madagascar's long running hunger crisis derives from its susceptibility to natural disasters, including drought and floods, which are set to become more frequent and severe as its temperatures continue to rise twice as fast as the global average. A key WFP priority is to render vulnerable communities, including smallholder farmers, more resilient to climate shocks. http://bit.ly/2SKSsVt   Sep. 2018   Rich nations must act to avoid 'refugee crisis' in East Africa.   Drastic cuts in foreign aid are putting millions of refugees fleeing war and drought in East Africa at risk of malnutrition and diseases such as diarrhea, dysentery and cholera, aid agencies warned this week.   The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said donor funding to Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania - which host over 2 million refugees from neighbouring nations - has dropped by over 60 percent compared to the previous year.   The lack of funds has meant that conditions in many refugee camps across the three nations are deteriorating - with less food, clean water and sanitation available for refugees.   "Fast and furious budget cuts are hitting the East Africa aid sector hard. If more funding isn't found, malnutrition will rise, schools will close, and water-borne diseases will break out," the NRC's Regional Director Nigel Tricks said in a statement.   "Rich nations should step up to support countries that are still accepting refugees. We have a window to avoid a refugee catastrophe in East Africa if we act now."   There are at least 22 million refugees around the world, says the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), mostly fleeing conflict, persecution or rights abuses in their countries.   About 85 percent of refugees are hosted in developing countries in Africa and the Middle East - most of which do not have the resources to support the hundreds of thousands fleeing wars in nations such as South Sudan, Somalia and Syria.   But funding from western donors to support these refugees has dramatically decreased. In Kenya, for example, the U.N. has only raised $97 million to support about 500,000 refugees this year - down 70 percent from the $340 million received in 2017.   Dana Hughes, UNHCR's East Africa spokesperson, said the "chronic levels of underfunding" were resulting in overcrowded classrooms, families going without food and risks of disease outbreaks due to a lack of water and poor sanitation.   Projects to help refugees become self-reliant and earn an income are either being cut or are in jeopardy, she added.   "Despite the outcry on refugee arrivals in Europe and other wealthier parts of the world, the reality is most live in developing countries," Hughes told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.   "Countries like Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are at the frontline of the global refugee crises and ensuring programmes to help refugees and bolster services in the countries receiving them is a global responsibility." http://bit.ly/2C4MHZQ   http://www.unhcr.org/emergencies.html   Aug. 2018   Turn the Tide: Refugee Education in Crisis. (UNHCR)   While the population uprooted by wars and persecution is on the rise worldwide, the numbers of refugee children enrolled in schools is failing to keep pace, according to a new report by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.   The study, Turn the Tide: Refugee Education in Crisis, found that four million refugee children do not attend school, an increase of half a million of out-of-school refugee children in just one year.   By the end of 2017, there were more than 25.4 million refugees around the world, 19.9 million of them under UNHCR's mandate. More than half - 52 per cent were children. Among them, 7.4 million were of school age.   'Education is a way to help children heal, but it is also key to rebuilding their countries', said Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees. 'Without education, the future of these children and their communities will be irrevocably damaged'.   Only 61 per cent of refugee children attend primary school, compared to 92 per cent of children globally.   As refugee children get older, this gap grows. Nearly two thirds of refugee children who go to primary school do not make it to secondary school. In total, 23 per cent of refugee children attend secondary school, compared to 84 per cent of children globally.   At tertiary level, the gap becomes a chasm. Globally, enrolment in higher education stands at 37 per cent, while only one per cent of refugees have the same opportunity, a figure that has not changed in three years.   'School is the first place in months or even years where refugee children find any normality', adds Grandi. Based on current patterns, unless urgent investment is undertaken, hundreds of thousands more children will join these disturbing statistics.   The report highlights progress made by those committed to the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants in enrolling an additional 500,000 formerly out-of-school refugee children in 2017. At the same time, it calls for more to be done to ensure all refugees get the quality education they deserve.   The report urges host countries to enrol refugee children in national systems, with a proper curriculum, all the way through primary and secondary school, to allow for recognized qualifications that can be their springboard to university or higher vocational training.   It further notes that countries in developing regions host 92 per cent of the world's school-age refugees and need more sustained financial support from the international community.   http://www.unhcr.org/turnthetide/   Food Ration Cuts are becoming the norm as Aid Agencies struggle to Keep Up, by Kimberly Curtis. (UN Dispatch)   Facing a massive funding shortfall, the World Food Program in January 2018 cut rations for Congolese refugees in Rwanda by 25%. Protests against those cuts turned deadly on February 27th when Rwandan police fired into a crowd, killing 11 refugees.   This incident was yet the latest example of an exacerbating crisis in Central Africa where several countries are struggling under the weight of refugees from DRC, Burundi and South Sudan. Making matters worse, these forgotten crises suffer from a severe lack of international funding, recently leading to aid agencies cutting food aid to the refugees once again. The situation now facing both refugees and their host countries is dire, fueling further instability in a reminder of why proper funding, programming and attention is needed for refugees around the world.   Africa currently hosts an estimated 18 million refugees and displaced peoples, roughly 26 percent of all refugees in the world. The situation has gotten worse in recent years as conflicts in Yemen, South Sudan, Burundi, the DRC, the Central African Republic and Nigeria have sent new millions across borders. African nations are used to hosting refugees, but with so many simultaneous conflicts, many countries are starting to buckle under the strain.   Making matters worse, international funding to help countries cope is falling far behind what is needed. In 2017, this resulted in food ration cuts in several different refugee situations. For example in August 2017, the World Food Programme was forced to reduce daily rations for refugees hosted in Tanzania by almost 40 percent. In October, the WFP cut rations for refugees in Kenya by 30 percent, just six months after full rations were reinstated. Food rations in Uganda for the estimated 2 million refugees, mainly from South Sudan, were in constant flux, being cut in half at one point due to funding woes.   Yet even as countries and aid agencies struggle to provide basic nutrition, more refugees come. Renewed conflict in the DRC's Ituri region, as well as continuing political instability in Burundi, has further swamped Rwanda and Uganda. Camps in Kenya and Ethiopia now have new Yemeni refugees to cope with, as well as the Somali refugees who have often called those countries home for decades. Even Tanzania, no stranger to hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees, is finding its hospitality strained.   The ongoing issue of hunger is forcing some refugees to return home, even though the violence they fled has not abated. These returns do not fix the problem, but rather shifts the humanitarian burden to harder to reach places.   With so many crises going on the world - potential famine in Yemen and the Horn of Africa, new refugee flows from Myanmar and Venezuela, disease outbreaks in Yemen and Bangladesh, rebuilding efforts in Iraq and Syria needs continue to grow.   The lack of the ability to work in many countries makes refugees reliant completely on aid, a situation that is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Likewise the lack of political will to address the root causes causing people to flee their homes means there is little chance that things will improve. New ideas are needed to help both refugees and their host communities to cope.   Jan. 2018   U.N. forced to cut food aid for refugees in east Africa due to lack of funds. (WFP)   Cuts in food rations for 1.5 million refugees in east Africa, due to funding shortages, could increase school dropouts, crime and malnutrition, a United Nations official said this week.   With humanitarian needs rising around the world, donors are prioritising crises in Syria, Yemen and Bangladesh, said Peter Smerdon, the World Food Programme (WFP)'s east Africa spokesman.   As a result, refugees in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Rwanda fleeing drought and conflict have had maize, beans and vegetable oil rations cut by almost a third over the last seven months, he said.   "In my 15 years at WFP, I have never seen this number of refugees, at this time of year, having cuts to their food rations," he said.   "Needs have gone through the roof for the whole of the humanitarian system, and donors are claiming they can't keep up with these increased needs. And the longer they continue, the more likely people will fall through the cracks."   The four east African nations provide sanctuary for millions fleeing drought in the Horn of Africa and protracted conflict in Somalia and South Sudan - the world's youngest nation - where civil war has created the continent's biggest refugee crisis.   WFP has only received about one-fifth of almost $360 million required to support refugees in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania in 2018, Smerdon said.   He warned that WFP would have to further reduce rations if funding did not come through. "Child malnutrition will certainly go up."   http://www.wfp.org/news/news-release/food-rations-refugees-rwanda-are-reduced-amidst-funding-shortfalls http://www.unhcr.org/emergencies.html http://www.unhcr.org/news.html http://www.nrc.no/ http://www.internal-displacement.org/ http://www.wvi.org/east-africa-childrens-crisis/pressrelease/world-vision-deeply-concerned-about-effects-disasters Visit the related web page
	124 million people face crisis food insecurity by WFP, OCHA, Fews Net, agencies   Global Report on Food Crises 2018 (WFP)   124 million people in 51 countries experienced high levels of food insecurity, warns a new report.   A new report sounds the alarm regarding surging levels of acute hunger. Some 124 million people in 51 countries were affected by acute food insecurity during 2017 - 11 million more people than the year before - according to the latest edition of the Global Report on Food Crises.   The report defines acute food insecurity as hunger so severe that it poses an immediate threat to lives or livelihoods.   The increase is largely attributable to new or intensified conflict and insecurity in Myanmar, north-east Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Yemen. Prolonged drought conditions also resulted in consecutive poor harvests in countries already facing high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition in eastern and southern Africa.   Produced each year by a group of international humanitarian partners the report was presented by the European Union, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) at a briefing for UN member nations in Rome.   It finds that food crises are increasingly determined by complex causes such as conflict, extreme climatic shocks and high prices of staple food often acting at the same time.   The situation revealed by the Global Report highlights the urgent need for simultaneous action to save lives, livelihoods and to address the root causes of food crises, the partners said.   Conflict and climate change key culprits   Conflict continued to be the main driver of acute food insecurity in 18 countries - 15 of them in Africa or the Middle East. It is the primary reason for most of the world's cases of acute food insecurity, accounting for 60 percent of the global total, or 74 million people.   Climate disasters - mainly drought - were also major triggers of food crises in 23 countries, two-thirds of them in Africa, and were responsible for pushing some 39 million people into acute food insecurity.   Conflict, climate disasters and other drivers often contribute to complex crises that have devastating and long lasting consequences on the livelihood of people.   Entire communities and more children and women are in need of nutritional support compared to last year, and long lasting solutions are needed if we want to revert this trend.   Conflict will likely remain a major driver of food crises in 2018, affecting Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, north-eastern Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen as well as Libya and the central Sahel (Mali and Niger), according to the report.   Yemen will mostly likely continue to be the largest food crisis by far. The situation there is expected to deteriorate, particularly because of restricted access, economic collapse and outbreaks of disease.   Meanwhile, the impact of severe dry weather on crop and livestock production is likely to heighten food insecurity in pastoral areas of Somalia, south-eastern Ethiopia and eastern Kenya, and in West African and Sahel countries including Senegal, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.   Key messages:   Around 124 million people in 51 countries face Crisis food insecurity or worse (equivalent of IPC/CH Phase 3 or above). They require urgent humanitarian action to save lives, protect livelihoods, and reduce hunger and malnutrition.   The worst food crises in 2017 were in north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen and South Sudan, where nearly 32 million people were food-insecure and in need of urgent assistance. Famine (IPC/CH Phase 5) was declared in two counties of South Sudan in February 2017. Although humanitarian assistance has thus far contributed towards preventing large-scale famines, humanitarian needs remain exceptionally high across the four countries.   Last year's Global Report on Food Crises identified 108 million people in Crisis food security or worse across 48 countries.   A comparison of the 45 countries included in both editions of the Global Report on Food Crises reveals an increase of 11 million people - an 11 percent rise in the number of food-insecure people needing urgent humanitarian action across the world.   This rise can largely be attributed to new or intensified and protracted conflict or insecurity in countries such as Yemen, northern Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Myanmar. Persistent drought has also played a major role, causing consecutive poor harvests in countries already facing high levels of food insecurity in eastern and southern Africa.   Levels of acute malnutrition in crisis-affected areas remain of concern; there continues to be a double burden of high acute and chronic malnutrition in protracted crises.   The number of children and women in need of nutritional support increased between 2016 and 2017, mainly in areas affected by conflict or insecurity such as Somalia, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen and northern Nigeria. Some of these countries have also experienced severe outbreaks of cholera, exacerbating levels of acute malnutrition.   Food insecurity and malnutrition: primary drivers in 2017   Conflict and insecurity continued to be the primary drivers of food insecurity in 18 countries, where almost 74 million food-insecure people remain in need of urgent assistance. Half of these people were in countries affected by conflict or insecurity in Africa, and more than a third were in the Middle East.   Food-insecure people in need of urgent action in countries affected by conflict or insecurity accounted for 60 percent of the total population facing Crisis food insecurity or worse across the world.   Climate disasters, mainly drought were also major triggers of food crises in 23 countries, with over 39 million food-insecure people in need of urgent assistance. Two thirds of these countries were in Africa, where almost 32 million people faced acute food insecurity. (22/3/2018)   http://www.wfp.org/news/news-release/food-crises-continue-strike-and-acute-hunger-intensifies http://www.fao.org/emergencies/resources/maps/detail/en/c/877611/ http://www.fsincop.net/resource-centre/detail/en/c/1110426/ http://www.fao.org/webcast/home/en/item/4635/icode/ http://reliefweb.int/report/world/global-report-food-crises-2018   Mar. 2018   Report from the World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to the UN Security Council on food insecurity hot spots, need for continued humanitarian support.   Food insecurity in conflict-stricken countries continues to deteriorate, meaning humanitarian efforts to provide affected communities with food relief and livelihood support remain extremely critical, FAO and WFP have told the UN Security Council.   Their latest report to the Council on food insecurity covers 16 countries: Afghanistan, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Iraq, Lebanon regarding the Syrian refugees, Liberia, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, Ukraine and Yemen, plus the transboundary Lake Chad Basin area.   In half of these places, the FAO-WFP assessment notes, a quarter or more of the population is facing crisis or emergency levels of hunger as measured on the international IPC food insecurity scale. These include:   But these are far from being the only countries flagged as cause for concern.   For example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- where serious food security concerns have been overshadowed by crises in other parts of Africa -- the situation is rapidly deteriorating, the report warns. There, 11 percent of the population is now in IPC Crisis phase or above, adding up to 7.7 million people who are coping with acute hunger.   In Sudan, 3.8 million people are in IPC Crisis phase or above. In Iraq, that figure is 3.2 million while in the Lake Chad basin, the number is 2.9 million people. In Burundi and Haiti, it is 1.8 and 1.3 million, respectively.   Conflict drives hunger   A common factor undermining food security in all 16 countries included in the report: conflict. Indeed, the intensification of conflicts is a key reason behind the recent resurgence of world hunger levels following decades of steady declines, according to the UN's most recent assessment of global food security.   The number of hungry people on the planet rose to 815 million people in 2016, the assessment, released last October, found. The majority of the hungry live in countries wracked by conflict - 489 million people.   Food security essential to peace   The new FAO/WFP update is the latest in a series of briefings to the Security Council on food security in countries it is formally monitoring. It reflects the new consensus that to achieve sustainable development and food security and nutrition goals, activities to support resilient livelihoods must be combined with peacebuilding and conflict resolution efforts. Investing in food security can strengthen efforts to prevent conflict and achieve sustained peace.   * Access the 53 page report: http://bit.ly/2DX2dIu http://www.wfp.org/news/news-release/hunger-conflict-zones-continues-intensify http://www.fao.org/state-of-food-security-nutrition/en/ http://reliefweb.int/report/world/hunger-conflict-zones-continues-intensify Visit the related web page
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