Cholera, hunger push Yemen to edge: UN official

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A senior UN official has said that war-torn Yemen, already reeling from malnutrition and dwindling healthcare, is plummeting into further distress amid a deadly cholera outbreak and looming famine.

"Historically, Yemen has been one of the poorest Arab nations -- if not the poorest -- with (poverty) and corruption, poor governance and poor infrastructure. The war has simply made it much worse," Auke Lootsma, UN Development Programme (UNDP) Country Director said.

Xinhua news agency said Lootsma was briefing journalists in New York via teleconference from the Yemeni capital Sanaa. He compared the situation in the country to a bus "racing towards the edge of a cliff".

Instead of hitting the brakes and turning around, "the one controlling the direction of the bus keeps going and pushes the accelerator, all but certain to crash", Lootsma warned.

He stressed that the Yemeni people were enduring incredible hardship, with 70 percent of the population -- some 20 million people -- in need of humanitarian assistance.

Additionally, some 400,000 cases of cholera recorded in the past few months have resulted in 1,900 deaths.

Due to the scope of the crisis combined with a lack of funding and access, humanitarians "are asked to cover gaps that are well beyond" their mandates and capacities, he said.

Yemen was on the brink of famine, with 60 percent of the population not knowing where its next meal is coming from, according to the UN official.

"The current food security crisis is a man-made disaster not only resulting from decades of poverty and under-investment, but also as a war tactic through economic strangulation."

Pointing out that Yemen imported 90 percent of its food even before the crisis, he painted a picture of the difficulty in bringing food into the country now as "it is actually financially out of reach for many of the poor families at this point in time."

"The collapse of the health, water and sanitation sector due to a lack of salaries and damaged infrastructure" exacerbated the situation, the UNDP Country Director said.

Almost half of the health facilities were no longer functioning because they are partly or completely damaged.

And "doctors and nurses are not coming to work because they have not been paid and looking for income elsewhere".

With almost 1.2 million civil servants having not been paid since September 2016, many businesses have collapsed.

--IANS

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