UN Sounds Alarm Over Unprecedented Hunger Emergency In West And Central Africa - Axadle | Stay Informed With Horn Of Africa Headlines

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned that millions of people in West and Central Africa were facing record levels of hunger as conflict, displacement, economic hardship, and repeated extreme weather pushed the region toward a major crisis.  From June to August, more than 36 million people struggled to meet their basic food needs, and that number is expected to rise to over 52 million. This included nearly three million people facing emergency conditions and 2,600 in Mali at risk of catastrophic hunger. Margot van der Velden, Regional Director for West and Central Africa, said that without immediate funding, WFP would be forced to further scale down both the number of people it reached and the size of food rations distributed. WFP attributed the deepening hunger crisis in part to ongoing conflict, which had displaced more than 10 million vulnerable people across the region, including over two million refugees and asylum seekers in Chad, Cameroon, Mauritania, and Niger. Nearly eight million more were internally displaced, primarily in Nigeria and Cameroon.