Up to 323 million people could face acute hunger in 2022, Head of the Emergencies Department at the World Food Programme, Margot van der Velden said on Wednesday.
As Velden knows quite a lot about how to operate in war environments. From the Sahel, to South Sudan, Syria, Yemen and all the way to Afghanistan, van der Velden is the creative and strategical mind behind the key operational decisions that allow WFP to bring food to civilians in war contexts.
“That’s the biggest challenge in every conflict,” she says sitting in her office in Rome and surrounded by paperwork. “And that’s why the approval four years ago of (resolution) 2417 was such a breakthrough moment because, for the first time, the higher UN authority acknowledged the link between hunger and conflict, giving the humanitarian world a wider framework under which to operate when starvation is used as a weapon of war.”
That, of course, is again the challenge in Ukraine, an emergency that just a few months back wasn’t part of van der Velden’s packed agenda.
Conflict and insecurity are the main drivers of hunger, and in Ukraine, their combination is causing the fastest-growing humanitarian crisis in the world. “It is a very complex situation with too many ramifications,” explains this humanitarian who has worked in conflicts for the past two decades. And the problem is by no means limited to having people trapped in the east of the country without access to food.
“The Ukraine conflict has caused upheaval in global food and energy markets, with soaring food and fuel prices putting millions at risk of hunger across the world,” says van der Velden.
Such figures are staggering even for an organisation that has been working on the frontlines of conflicts and natural disasters for more than 50 years, saving lives in emergencies, but also bringing hope to millions caught in those conflicts through resilience projects.
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