UN agency Approximate 4.3m Nigerians facing severe hunger in North-East

The World Food Programme (WFP), has estimated that 4.3 million Nigerians in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States all in the North-Eastern region of the country are likely to face severe hunger between June and August 2023.

The United Nations agency, in a report released on Sunday, said relying on statistics from the March Cadre Harmonisé which is a unified tool for the consensual analysis of acute food and nutrition insecurity in the Sahel and West Africa Region, it has come to the conclusion that a lot of factors are responsible for the projection.

Some of the factors, the agency said, arise from years of “armed conflict in the region which has caused hunger, starvation and malnutrition with millions in need of life-saving assistance and facing the risk of famine.”

“Almost 600,000 are on the brink of catastrophe. These people will face emergency levels of food insecurity, with extremely high rates of acute malnutrition and mortality in the absence of a sustained scale-up of humanitarian assistance,” the WFP said in the report.

The UN body added that the ongoing conflict has affected the nutrition status of children on several fronts, adding that two million children in the North-East region are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition.

“A total of 24.8 million people, or 1 out of 8 individuals, are experiencing acute hunger this year in Nigeria’s 26 states and the capital, Abuja.”

“A lack of assistance also increases the risk of youth recruitment into armed groups, as well as displaced populations returning to inaccessible areas where they are beyond the reach of humanitarian assistance and other social services.

“The more people are in need of urgent food assistance who go unassisted, the greater the risk of starvation and death among the most vulnerable, and the more people will be forced to resort to coping mechanisms such as survival sex, selling possessions and child labour.

“Chronic Insecurity is preventing many people in the North-East from growing the food they need or earning an income.

“In the last year, the conflict has left households unable to leave their homes due to an increase in movement restrictions, killings and abduction of civilians, particularly in Borno where the violence is concentrated.

“Thousands of people are left with only one month’s food supply as households in conflict-affected areas rely on minimal income to purchase food,” the UN agency stressed.