Food assistance for 3.8 million Syrians at risk, World Food Programme warns

Leading official says UN agency is already reduced to providing 'half rations' in Syria and Yemen

Officials inspect a lorry of UN aid for survivors of February's earthquake, at Bab Al Hawa border crossing with Turkey, in Idlib province, north-west Syria. AP

Almost 3.8 million people in Syria are at risk of losing World Food Programme assistance by July if additional funding is not secured, a leading official with the UN organisation said in Dubai on Wednesday.

Despite a 40 per cent increase in its annual budget for 2023, the food agency is at “half rations” in Yemen and Syria, warned WFP Mena regional director Corinne Fleischer.

The WFP provides aid to 13 million people in Yemen and to seven million in Syria.

In Syria, the rates of malnutrition are the highest they've been since the country's civil war began in 2011, Ms Fleischer told a media briefing.

“Conflict feeds hunger,” she said.

“We can't continue to feed the same people every month and then add more people.

“We need governments to take care of their own people again through their own social protection systems and we start reducing the needs.”

An already desperate situation caused by the 12-year war in Syria was exacerbated by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake on February 6 that killed more than 6,000 people in the north of the country.

The WFP requires $150 million to support people in Syria for the next six months with post-earthquake assistance — but only 16 per cent of that amount is funded, Ms Fleischer said.

A UN inquiry found the regime of Syria's President Bashar Al Assad and the UN itself were guilty of delays in aid to Syria after the earthquake.

The UN commission of inquiry said on Monday there had been a “wholesale failure” by the Syrian government and international community to provide immediate assistance to Syria.

In February, the WFP called for more urgency in global response to the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, saying the disaster had put extra strain on an already stretched region.

In south-eastern Turkey, more than 44,000 people were killed by the quake.

“We need governments to respond to our appeal for funding,” Walid Ibrahim, network coordinator of the WFP-managed UN Humanitarian Response Depot in Dubai told The National earlier.