As the ongoing crisis in Ukraine continues, families are struggling to bring food to the table during the holy month of Ramadan in the Middle East and North Africa.

Juliette Touma, from UNICEF focusing Middle East and North Africa joined ticker earlier.

Six weeks into the war in Ukraine, the fragile nutritional status of children in the Middle East and North Africa is expected to worsen.

While Muslims in the region observe the holy month of Ramadan, disruption in imports caused by the conflict is creating food shortages amid high prices of essential commodities, including wheat, edible oils, and fuel.

If this continues, it will severely impact children, especially in Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Yemen; some are hunger hotspots according to recent assessments undertaken prior to the Ukraine crisis, as those countries were already struggling with conflicts, economic crises, or a sharp increase in global food prices in 2021.

“Definitely during the COVID 19 pandemic, we have seen in this region, interruptions to the supply chain, and that impacted the availability but also the prices of basic food items,” Juliette told ticker.

“In addition to that, we have high poverty levels and the high unemployment due to conflicts but also due to the pandemic. And now with crisis in the Ukraine, this has certainly impacted the situation even further,” she continues.

“In a place like Yemen, we do know that a child dies every 10 minutes due to preventable causes, including malnutrition. So the risk and the fear is that malnutrition among children in these two countries, is indeed going to increase.”

The ripple effect of the continuing war in Ukraine is compounding the impacts of two long years of the COVID-19 pandemic on economies, employment and poverty in the MENA region, where more than 90 per cent of food is imported.

Many countries have already been struggling with child malnutrition, especially due to ongoing armed conflicts and humanitarian crises.

“when you have more conflicts, that means that the attention is diverted,”

Juliette tells TICKER

“And this is a fear, of course that we have at UNICEF. So I mean, the best solution for all of us and the world is for these crisis to come to an end for these wars to come to an end as soon as possible. We don’t need more wars in this region. We don’t need more conflicts around the world. And certainly we do hope that all these wars will come to an end as soon as possible also for the sake of children wherever they are in this in this world.”

QUICK FACTS

• Only 36 per cent of young children in the region are receiving the diets they need to grow and develop in a healthy way;
• The region is home to high rates of undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies. On an average, nearly one in five children is stunted while the average wasting rate is 7 per cent.

In the MENA countries most impacted by the war in Ukraine, undernutrition rates are higher.

• In Yemen, 45 per cent of children are stunted and over 86 per cent have anaemia;
• In Sudan, 13.6 per cent of children suffer from wasting, 36.4 per cent are stunted and nearly half have anaemia;
• In Lebanon, 94 per cent of young children are not receiving the diets they need, while over 40 per cent of women and children under the age of five have anaemia;
• In Syria, only one in four young children get the diets they need to grow healthy. The price of the average food basket has nearly doubled in 2021 alone.

UNICEF works with partners to deliver and scale-up lifesaving treatment services for children with severe wasting in conjunction with its early detection in children under five years old.

Simultaneously, with partners, UNICEF delivers preventive nutrition services including micronutrient supplements, growth monitoring and counselling and support on breastfeeding and age-appropriate complementary feeding.

“what we’re calling for at UNICEF is for concerted efforts, so that we can all work together to provide children with with malnutrition, with the assistance they need, because it’s a sort of an illness, at some point, it becomes a sort of an illness,” Juliette says.

“We need to provide children with the micronutrients that they need, we need to do assessments early on, so that we identify and detect malnutrition among children early on,

“And we need more assistance to come to these countries, including the delivery of the supplements, but also of basic foods and basic medicine so that we avert more children from going hungry and more children from falling ill with malnutrition.”