As deaths caused by coronavirus around the world continue to rise, the World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that the world faces a possible “hunger pandemic” as the number of people most in need of food could almost double this year.
At the end of 2019, 135 million people were living with “acute hunger”. But with many countries around the world enforcing quarantine, that number is likely to rise to 265 million, the WFP says.
“Before the coronavirus even became an issue, I was saying that 2020 would be facing the worst humanitarian crisis since World War Two for a number of reasons,” WFP executive director David Beasley said on Tuesday.
The organisation, which received $8.3bn (£6.7bn) in 2019, now needs between $10-12bn to sustain its operations for this year.
So which countries are most at risk?
Yemen
Even before the war in Yemen began, the country was the poorest in the Arab world.
But since a Saudi-led coalition intervened in the conflict against Yemen's Houthi rebels in 2015, the country's humanitarian situation has deteriorated still further.
“As conflicts become longer, more and more people become vulnerable”, the WFP's Chief Economist and Director of Research, Assessment and Monitoring Division, Arif Husain, told the BBC. “In 2016 in Yemen, we were maybe assisting three or four million people. Today…
