New York – December 02, 2020
EACH YEAR the United Nations puts out a carefully crafted state-of-the-world assessment from a humanitarian perspective.
It considers how much help is needed to stave off disaster in the most vulnerable countries.
According to its latest “Global Humanitarian Overview”, released on December 1st, the state of the world is stark.
A year ago the UN projected that 168m people would need assistance in 2020.
For 2021 the number is 40% higher: a record 235m.
That is almost as many people as there are in Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most-populous country.
The UN says it will need $35bn to support the neediest 160m of these—about four in five of them in Africa and the Middle East—across 56 countries.
Extreme poverty has risen for the first time in 22 years. Women and young people are the hardest-hit.
The main cause of the increase is covid-19—not the health effects of the virus itself but its toll on economies, with recession, food-price rises and a decline in remittances from abroad adding to the millions of people who are so poor they will not survive without help.
The UN fears a near doubling of the number of people at risk of starvation. “Famine is back,” says Mark Lowcock, the UN’s humanitarian chief.
Famines had seemed largely a thing of the past: the only significant one this century was in 2011-12 in Somalia, where about a quarter of a million people died.
Now Yemen, north-east Nigeria, Burkina Faso, South Sudan and half a dozen other countries are vulnerable.
“If we get through 2021 without major famines, that will actually be quite a result,” believes Mr Lowcock.
The pandemic is also having a knock-on effect on health beyond the virus’s immediate toll. In vulnerable places it is causing a contraction in life-saving services such as immunisation, malaria prevention and neonatal care.
The result, predicts Mr Lowcock, will be a reduction in life-expectancy—not as visible or concentrated as famine, but another unhappy reversal after decades of progress.
Vaccines offer hope in the fight against covid-19, yet rich countries are bound to roll them out fastest, paying too little heed to the amounts and most appropriate types available for the poorest places.
The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines need to be stored at very low temperatures. “Frankly, we don’t think anywhere where we work is going to be able to very quickly put in place cold-chain requirements,” says Mr Lowcock.
He also cautions against a rush to channel efforts into covid at the expense of routine immunisation (against measles, say) with a higher life-saving impact in many poor and crisis-hit places.
The pandemic may be the biggest reason for the rise in humanitarian stress, but two longer-term factors are also pushing it up.
One is global warming.
Many of the countries most at risk from the effects of climate change already have big humanitarian problems (with extra risks in the coming months from the La Niña weather system).
The other is conflict, which is spreading trouble in a growing number of places, including Western Sahara and the Sahel, Ethiopia and northern Mozambique as well as Nagorno-Karabakh. Syria, which looms large in the UN’s humanitarian efforts, has seen no peace: the UN expects an extra 1.9m people will need humanitarian assistance there.
Overall, the number of people displaced within countries because of conflict and violence has reached a new high of 51m, and over the past decade the number of refugees crossing borders has doubled to 20m.
