The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) warned of the serious effects of the climate crisis on small islands and island developing States and asked donors for funds to anticipate the period of rains and hurricanes.
“The WFP is observing multiple effects, one of them is that the islands, with their very particular idiosyncrasies, are extremely affected by the climate crisis, from rising sea levels to droughts and floods,” said the regional director for Latin America. and the Caribbean of the UN Lola Castro, in an interview with the EFE agency in the Panamanian capital.
The consequences of climate change and how to address them is the central message that WFP will take to the IV International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), scheduled for May 27 to 30 in Saint John, Antigua and Barbuda.
Small islands and island states face the “effects of the climate crisis, the post-cooling crisis and also the debt crisis”, a combination of factors that translates, among other impacts, into high levels of insecurity food, the headline highlighted. from the ONU.
According to the latest WFP report on Food Security and Livelihoods in the Caribbean, there are around “three million people who are food insecure” in the small islands of the English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean, which represents “an improvement compared to with last year.” ”, but it is still “very high, because it is 70 percent higher than before covid,” said the regional director of the UN program.
“We have the largest islands, (countries like) the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Haiti (…) that also have very high levels of food insecurity,” said Lola Castro, explaining that “in Haiti, 50% of the population is in a situation of food insecurity and in the Dominican Republic the figure rises to 1.3 million people.”
The program identified needs in the order of 95 million dollars (87.5 million euros) over the next six months for interventions in the small islands of the Caribbean, as well as in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, which, in themselves, need of 76 million dollars (70 million euros) for various humanitarian actions, school feeding, among others.
“The important thing is that we have the money before all the shocks, we know that the hurricane season begins on June 1; “We have to be prepared and, for that, we need the money to place the food in different countries, in warehouses, in advance,” he stated.
“We also need funds to be able to transfer money to help and also have stocks of non-food items,” the official added.
Source: Observadora
