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Malnutrition "Rapidly Increasing" Among Palestinians, Says World Food BodyThursday 23 May 2002
author: Kalyani in Oneworld.net
summary
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) has announced plans to help feed 500,000 people living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories who are living in poverty and face severe food shortages.
Malnutrition "Rapidly Increasing" Among Palestinians, Says World Food Body
by Kalyani
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) has announced plans to help feed 500,000 people living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories who are living in poverty and face severe food shortages.
WFP plans to provide 70,000 tons of food aid--including wheat flour, rice, sugar, vegetable oil, and pulses--to populations in the West Bank and Gaza strip who are suffering most from a lack of food.
Among those most urgently in need of food relief are some 360,000 "extremely poor," according to WFP, most of whom belong to families where the breadwinner is a single mother, elderly, disabled, or chronically ill.
"Even when food is available in some of the markets, many impoverished Palestinians have become increasingly unable to meet all their food needs," said WFP's regional director Khaled Adly Tuesday, adding that "hunger and malnutrition are rapidly increasing" among those in the territories.
"Dramatically deteriorating" standards of living caused by restricted movement of goods across borders with Israel could lead to malnutrition, especially among children, according to WFP.
An economic blockade--which has been progressively tightened since the start of the al-Aqsa uprising in September, 2000,--had hit food supply networks to market holders, thereby reducing the amount of food available locally for purchase. The current shortfall of 740,000 metric tons of cereal would usually be met with commercial imports.
In addition, many Palestinians finding it increasingly difficult to afford regular meals since, according to World Bank figures from March, up to half of the territories' populations live on less than two dollars per day, the internationally-recognized "poverty line."
WFP pointed out that a crisis was brewing in the territories even before the start of the latest round of conflict, which involved a series of Palestinian suicide attacks on Israeli civilians and incursions by the Israeli Defense Forces into major towns and cities of the West Bank.
"The latest Israeli military incursions have dealt a hard blow to an already vulnerable economy pushing many Palestinians into destitution," said WFP's Adly, noting that the situation is "alarming."
In April, another UN agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization, warned that hunger and malnutrition were on the rise among Palestinians due to a blockade which had left "millions of people severely impoverished and extremely food insecure."
As part of its effort to provide 500,000 with relief, WFP is urging potential donors to help raise the estimated US$18 million needed to buy 41,000 tons of food to supplement the 29,000 tons already mobilized.