Famine around the corner, says World Food Programme
Food Security
How the score is calculated
The score starts at 8. It adds points from recorded affected, deaths, displaced and casualty counts, plus terms found in the story title, event type or status. For each count, only its highest matching band is used.
- Affected people
- 1–999: +5 · 1,000–9,999: +12 · 10,000–99,999: +20 · 100,000–999,999: +28 · 1 million+: +35
- Deaths
- 1–9: +8 · 10–99: +14 · 100–999: +22 · 1,000+: +30
- Displaced people
- 1–9,999: +6 · 10,000–99,999: +12 · 100,000+: +18
- Casualties
- 100 or more: +8
- Story wording
- +10 for terms such as catastrophe, famine, war, conflict, major earthquake, mass casualty or critical. Otherwise, +5 for active, ongoing, emergency, outbreak, cyclone or hurricane.
Score bands: Watch 0–24 · Moderate 25–49 · High 50–74 · Critical 75–100. Scores are capped at 100. Missing or unparseable figures add no points.
This is a rule-based WorldsAid triage indicator, not an official or independently validated classification. It does not account for recency or local context, and it can understate events with incomplete reporting. Check the linked sources.
Historical record
Status: CLOSED · Imported 2026-10-07
Closed for this historical import at the site owner’s request; not a new assessment of current conditions.
In brief
- What happenedA child at a WFP-supported clinic in Hajjah is diagnosed with moderate acute malnutrition. © WFP/Issa Al-Ragh High-level donor conference convened by UN hears millions are at risk of starvation without immediate intervention By Annabel Symington and Peyvand Khorsandi People in Yemen face famine unless the world takes immediate action, the World Food Programme (WFP) will warn today.
- How many affectedAffected persons: 8,000,000
- What help is neededThe UN estimates nearly 250,000 people have died during Yemen’s six-year war, including more than 131,000 people from the indirect consequences of conflict, such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure — the situation in the country is worse now than it has been at any point since 2015 .
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
A child at a WFP-supported clinic in Hajjah is diagnosed with moderate acute malnutrition. © WFP/Issa Al-Ragh High-level donor conference convened by UN hears millions are at risk of starvation without immediate intervention By Annabel Symington and Peyvand Khorsandi People in Yemen face famine unless the world takes immediate action, the World Food Programme (WFP) will warn today. Nearly 50,000 people in Yemen are already living in famine-like conditions with 5 million just a step away. David Beasley, WFP’s Executive Director, will press home the organization’s fears for the country at a high-level fundraising conference, hosted by the UN with the governments of Switzerland and Sweden. The UN estimates nearly 250,000 people have died during Yemen’s six-year war, including more than 131,000 people from the indirect consequences of conflict, such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure — the situation in the country is worse now than it has been at any point since 2015 . Yemen is WFP’s biggest humanitarian operation, supplying food assistance to nearly 13 million people — almost half the population — while another 3.3 million women and children receive nutrition support. With the COVID-19 pandemic still in full swing, the international community cannot wait for an official famine classification in Yemen to act. A famine classification in Yemen may never come because of the heavy burden of evidence required. It would have to be proven that 20 percent of households face an extreme lack of food; 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition; and two people for every 10,000 are dying each day due to outright starvation or the interaction of malnutrition and disease. Yet in conflict zones — where communications are disrupted, communities are displaced and humanitarian access is restricted — locking down the facts of a fast-deteriorating situation is a huge challenge. No one doubts that people are already dying and food insecurity will continue to rise without immediate humanitarian support. WFP is keen to stress to donor governments that Yemen needs peace — only peace can break the corrosive cycle of hunger and conflict that has stalked the country for six years. Progress towards peace requires urgent action to protect civilians, provide emergency assistance, secure humanitarian access and support an economy which has shrunk by half since the start of the conflict. WFP needs at least US$1.9 billion in 2021 to provide the minimum amount of food assistance needed to prevent famine—to maintain operations through to July, it needs an immediate injection of US$482 million. Without this, from June, WFP may have to cut nutrition support to 1.1 million children and mothers, while 5 million people may face cuts to emergency food assistance in May. Right now, around 8 million people receive WFP food assistance on alternate months, instead of monthly. This has been the case since April 2020 because WFP simply did not have sufficient funds. Cuts, in turn, have contributed to rising hunger levels, coming on top of continued conflict, displacement, rising food prices and a declining currency – all of which hit worrying new peaks in 2020. So far in 2021, WFP has received US$150 million from the United States, US$75 million from Germany, nearly US$50 million from the World Bank, and US$40 million from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as well as some smaller contributions from private donors, individuals and the UN pooled funds. These funds are being used to reach the most food insecure people in areas where death and starvation are already a reality. But this is not enough for reach all the people in need this year. Until 2019, WFP received around 70 percent of funds from three donors — the US, Saudi Arabia and UAE. They increased their contributions each year as conflict pushed more and more families into crisis. This allowed WFP to scale up to support increasing needs, going from supporting around 1 million people in 2015 to nearly 13 million in 2019. This humanitarian scale-up — one of the largest in recent history – prevented a famine in 2019. In 2020, however, WFP received around half of funds needed. Now it hopes other donors will give at similar levels to previous years. The pledging conference will also be attended by António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, while Sir Mark Lowcock, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, will be moderating. In January, Beasley warned of an impending catastrophe in Yemen. “We’re struggling now to feed 13 million people,” he said. “And if we’re struggling with 13 million people, and we don’t have the money, and the access and the tools that we need, then what do you think’s going to happen?”
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against 1 attributed source, cleaned feed formatting and checked the crisis, place and reporting date. 1 human-impact figure was separated from the narrative and dated where the source allowed. Earlier observations remain in the evidence history instead of being silently overwritten.
Verified figures
- Affected persons
- 8,000,000 retained at 2021-03-02
What we knew when
- WorldsAid record entered the retained historical dataset.
- Last verification represented by this immutable snapshot.
Earlier figures are never replaced by later values; additional observations are retained as new ledger entries.
Provenance
This page renders the last verified WorldsAid cache directly in HTML. It does not treat generated summaries as primary evidence.
Cached dataset: worldsai_drup771.sql.gz
Verified
SHA-256 6b4fbd8b6f69285f9962badd8fc9754531133aabc3f1cb2499585398c963ce47