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UN: Four million Syrians could starve as aid delivery lags

Al-Akhbar | July 5, 2013

Four million Syrians, a fifth of the population, are unable to produce or buy enough food to survive, the United Nations said on Friday.

The statement comes as donations to Syrian civilians has been lagging far behind the levels of financial assistance initially pledged by member states and called for by the UN.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP) said Syria’s domestic wheat production over the next 12 months is likely to be severely compromised and that it will need to import 1.5 million tons of wheat for the 2013 to 2014 season.

“There is a limited window of opportunity to ensure crisis-affected families do not lose vital sources of food and income,” the two agencies said.

After two years of a civil war that has killed more than 90,000 people, food shortages have escalated due to massive population displacement, disruption of agricultural production, unemployment, economic sanctions and high food and fuel prices.

FAO has launched an appeal for $41.7 million to assist 768,000 people and has so far only received $3.3 million.

The WFP and the FAO said the funding must be secured by August to provide farmers with fertilizers and seeds to plant in October. Otherwise, the report said, many farmers will be unable to harvest wheat until mid-2015.

Syria’s livestock sector has also been seriously depleted by the conflict, with poultry production down by more than 50 percent compared with 2011 and significant declines in numbers of sheep and cattle, the report found.

The agencies said domestic wheat output was seen at about 2.4 million tons in 2012 and 2013, some 40 percent less than the average annual harvest of more than 4 million tons before the conflict.

WFP said last month that Syrian families were increasingly resorting to begging for food to cope with shortages and high prices.

The average monthly price of wheat flour has more than doubled between May 2011 and May 2013 in several areas, and there are serious bread shortages across the country.

Food production has been hampered by high costs, damage to machinery and storage facilities and by the fact that many farmers have fled their land for fear of violence, the report found.

The FAO and the WFP also warned of a serious risk that livestock diseases could be transmitted to neighboring countries and said farmers needed vaccines to prevent this from happening.

A Syrian state buyer earlier this week issued a tender to buy 200,000 tons of flour on the international market and planned to pay with funds from bank accounts frozen by trade sanctions.

Food is excluded from US and European trade sanctions imposed on President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

More than a million Syrians have fled the war-torn country, and about 4.25 million Syrians have been internally displaced, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.

(Reuters, Al-Akhbar)

July 5, 2013 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , | Leave a comment

UN calls for record $5.2 billion aid package for Syria

Al-Akhbar | June 7, 2013

The United Nations on Friday launched a record $5.2-billion aid appeal to fund operations in Syria and neighboring nations, saying the number of people affected by the country’s brutal conflict was set to spiral.

The call for donations comes as the UN expects that 10.25 million Syrians – half the country’s population – will need humanitarian aid by the end of 2013.

The sum of aid being requested overshadows by far the $2.2 billion the UN sought in 2003 to help cope with the crisis sparked by the war in Iraq.

The $5.2 billion represents money needed across this year to pay for operations that have already been undertaken, are ongoing, or are due to be carried out until the end of December.

“The figure for the new appeal is both an expression of the alarm about the situation facing Syrians and an absence of a political solution,” said Adrian Edwards, spokesman for the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR.

It also marked a more than threefold increase on the $1.5 billion which the UN previously had said that it needed to cover operations this year.

The UN has so far received $1.0 billion of that sum, after launching an appeal last December.

In the latest appeal, the world body said that a total of $3.8 billion was needed to help Syrian refugees who have spilled across the country’s borders to escape fighting in their homeland.

The figure for operations inside Syria meanwhile was $1.4 billion.

According to UN estimates, more than 80,000 people have been killed and some 1.6 million Syrians have fled the country since the civil war began in March 2011 after a crackdown on protests against President Bashar al-Assad.

“The numbers represented in this plan are staggering,” said Amir Abdulla, deputy executive director of the UN’s World Food Program (WFP). “They’re not sustainable over the very long term.”

“They represent a tragedy for Syria and a burden on the region,” he told reporters.

The WFP, which has delivered 500 million meals in Syria so far this year, expects its weekly costs to rise from almost $20 million now to $36 million after September. It says it has a funding shortfall of about $725 million.

The WFP’s Syria Regional Emergency Coordinator Muhannad Hadi said: “We have reached a stage in Syria where some of the people, if they don’t get food from the World Food Programme, they simply do not eat.”

The overwhelming majority of the refugees have fled to neighboring Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, which are struggling to cope.

In Jordan, for example, one refugee camp is now the equivalent of the nation’s fifth-largest town.

With the revolt against Assad having morphed into a vicious, drawn-out conflict, the total number of refugees is expected to swell to at least 3.45 million by the end of this year, according to the UN appeal.

Within the country, a total of 6.8 million people are forecast to need aid this year, the majority of them people who have been forced to flee their homes because of the fighting.

“These are huge numbers. They are not sustainable over the very long term, which is why we hope that there will be a solution to the situation inside Syria,” said Abdulla.

“We hope that the world will respond, as millions of Syrians displaced in their home country, and refugees in neighboring countries, basically have little else to rely on at this time,” he added.

Syria’s pre-war population was 20.8 million.

“By the end of the year, half of the population of Syria will be in need of aid,” underlined Edwards.

The nature of the Syrian conflict has affected aid efforts, with convoys often having to clear dozens of checkpoints manned by different militias from both sides.

“In other operations, there’s often a front line when you’re dealing with two opposing forces. In this instance you’ve a very complex situation where there are pockets. There is no clear line. You’re dealing with a fragmented opposition who don’t follow a monolithic command and control structure,” said Abdulla.

(AFP, Reuters, Al-Akhbar)

June 8, 2013 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment