UN: Ukraine war should not cause other crises to be forgotten

According to IRNA from Reuters; “Unfortunately, the global refugee crisis is spreading around the world,” said Filippo Grande, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, before joining a meeting of EU development ministers in Brussels. I think the important message is that there are other places besides Ukraine that we should not forget.

He added: “First of all, because the crisis in Ukraine has affected many other fragile conditions and conditions and makes them more fragile, food security, energy crisis, rising prices and instability, which in itself can lead to more displacement.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday at a Security Council meeting on food security chaired by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who is chairing the Security Council this month: “Around the world, 49 Millions of people in 43 countries are on the brink of emergency starvation, and now the Ukraine war has given a terrible new dimension to global hunger, and Russia’s invasion of its neighbor (Ukraine) has virtually ended its food exports.

“Up to a 30 percent increase in the price of basic foodstuffs threatens people in Africa and the Middle East, including Cameroon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen,” Guterres said. When war breaks out, hunger arises among the people. About 60 percent of the world’s food shortages are in war zones.

“No country is immune to starvation,” he said. In April, the World Food Program and its partners distributed food and cash to more than three million Ukrainians. Until March, Ukraine fed the world with abundant food supplies. Most of the 140 million people starving worldwide last year lived in Afghanistan alone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

“Undoubtedly, when this council discusses war, there is hunger,” he said. When the Security Council decides on peacekeeping and political missions, hunger is part of it, and when it cannot reach a consensus, hungry people pay a high price.

Guterres also said he was in close contact with Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, the United States and the European Union to revive Ukrainian grain exports and chemical fertilizers at a UN food security meeting hosted by Blinken on Wednesday evening.

“The level of hunger in the world has reached its highest point,” he said. In just two years, the number of people facing severe food insecurity has doubled, from 135 million before the Corona epidemic to 276 million this year.

According to the United Nations, the war in Ukraine has pushed up food prices around the world. One billion and 700 million people in the world, one-third of whom live below the poverty line, are severely disadvantaged and cut off from food, energy and financial systems, leading to increased poverty and hunger.

Thirty-six countries count on Russia and Ukraine to supply and import more than half of their wheat needs, including some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.