Three in four families going hungry in parts of Yemen as fighting surges, UN food agency warns

Three in four families in parts of Yemen are going hungry from the “absolutely devastating” impact of a surge in fighting that has displaced tens of thousands of people and disrupted supplies to millions, the UN World Food Programme said on Friday.

Within just a few weeks, the fighting has driven the share of households without sufficient food to 74 per cent in government-controlled areas accessible to the WFP, the UN hunger agency’s assistant executive director for programme operations, Matthew Hollingworth, told reporters in Geneva via video link from Rome. The total population of government-held areas is estimated at around 10 million people.

Yemen is experiencing the most serious escalation in fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-aligned Houthi group since a UN-brokered truce largely halted cross-border attacks in 2022, with implications for Red Sea shipping lanes.

The Houthis, who already control most of northern Yemen including the capital Sanaa, seized the country’s entire Red Sea coast last month from Saudi-backed forces of the internationally recognised government, based in the southern port of Aden.

Displaced families are arriving outside Aden and around the mountain city of Taiz without any water or food, having had to leave everything behind, the WFP said. Prices of basic food staples such as wheat flour and vegetable oil are rising in a country that imports around 90 per cent of its food.

“We are looking at a hunger crisis that is going to grow as it persists,” Hollingworth said, adding that frontline areas like Taiz were increasingly hard to access due to the fighting.

Across Yemen, 18.3 million people face acute food insecurity, and 2.2 million children under five are acutely malnourished, including 500,000 suffering from severe acute malnutrition, the WFP said. More than 149,000 people have been displaced by the renewed fighting, according to the International Organization for Migration.