The Supreme Council for the Management and Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and International Cooperation in Sana’a had on Friday called on the UN World Food Program (WFP) to commit to its humanitarian work principles without engaging in politics.
In a statement reported by the Yemeni news agency Saba, the Council expressed its surprise at the WFP’s intention to reduce food aid in Yemen under the pretext of lack of funding.
The Council indicated that the aid provided by the program is actually reduced and is only being delivered every two or three months, which has exacerbated the humanitarian catastrophe and caused high rates of food insecurity and increased cases of malnutrition especially among children under the age of five.
The statement indicated that the Council had previously addressed the WFP to urgently intervene and re-distribute emergency food aid on a monthly basis, in order to limit the deterioration of the living conditions of thousands of families, but the Program did not respond and refrained from distributing aid in some provinces such as Bayda and Hodeidah.
The Council considered the WFP’s lack of commitment to the humanitarian laws and principles in providing assistance to the Yemeni people as “reflecting the extent of the program’s bias towards the side of the aggression countries, through the practice of blackmail and starvation of the Yemeni people.”
In the statement, the Council wondered about the fate of the $1,177,000,000 dollars that the program received as funding before the end of November,2021.
The statement stressed that “the WFP’s attempt to implement the aggression coalition’s agenda by exploiting the relief file as a pressure card to bring the Yemeni people to their knees is futile and contradicts the basic principles of conducting relief operations.”
