Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, is seeking for 350 million dollars as part of the revised UN Humanitarian Appeal for Coronavirus, COVID-19, to assist poor farmers.
FAO said this would help the farmers to continue to operate and safeguard the continuity of food supply chains and markets.
Its Director-General, QU Dongyu, said on Thursday in Rome, during the high-level UN event on humanitarian action, that COVID-19 impacts were driving up hunger and urgent action was required.
In a document made available to newsmen in Abuja, he said that the fund has become imperative to support a range of farming activities and prevent the food sector from being a vector of transmission of the disease.
The Director-General said there was a strong indication, from the ongoing assessments of the organization that the COVID-19 pandemic was driving up hunger in vulnerable countries.
“Before the pandemic, 135 million people worldwide were already coping with acute hunger caused by conflict, climate shocks, and economic downturns, according to the 2020 edition of the Global Report on Food Crisis.
“The report produced by FAO, EU and 13 other partners, noted that another 183 million were at risk of being pushed into extreme hunger if faced with an additional stressor,’’ he said.
Mr Dongyu said recent data from the FAO-hosted Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) initiative, indicated that in Afghanistan, food insecurity, already alarmingly high, had now been aggravated by the impact of coronavirus.
“The latest estimates show that 10.3 million people there are now dealing with crisis levels of acute hunger or worse.
“The trend is similar in the Central African Republic, where about 2.4 million people are now facing crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity, while in Somalia, 3.5 million people are projected to face crisis or worse in the coming months,’’ he said.
The Director-General told the virtual event that while assessments were taking place at country level as ongoing agricultural seasons unfolded, the impact of COVID-19 was already being seen in some of the world’s food crisis hot spots.
He said the world was at risk of looming food crisis and urgent measures must be taken to protect the most vulnerable, keep the global agricultural supply chains alive and mitigate the pandemic’s impacts across the food system.
The FAO Director-General noted that rural women were among the most vulnerable and the first to lose their incomes.
He said alarmed by a potential rise in food insecurity during the pandemic, many countries and organisations were mounting special efforts to keep agriculture safely running, markets well supplied in affordable and nutritious food, and consumers still able to access and purchase food in spite of movement restrictions and income losses.
According to Mr Dongyu, FAO and other UN agencies are concerned that COVID-19’s multiple impacts on economic activity and supply chains are limiting people’s ability to access food, increasingly restricting the cash liquidity of farmers, and handicapping farmers’ ability to produce and market food, which in the longer term could seriously degrade their livelihoods.
“Local food availability was already emerging as a critical risk, as many farmers had reduced income and resources to invest in the next planting season.”
NAN
