USAID
Thursday May 19, 2022
At the UN Security Council’s Ministerial on Food Security
today in New York, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced nearly $215
million in additional humanitarian assistance to address the global food
security crisis, which has been exacerbated by Russia’s war on Ukraine and its
corresponding impact on global markets. Even before the war began,
approximately 768 million people were chronically hungry. This new crisis has
only made an already dire situation significantly worse, with as many as 40
million people projected to be pushed into poverty and food insecurity through
the end of the year.
This additional support, provided through the U.S. Agency
for International Development (USAID), will expand emergency food security
operations in several countries already facing food insecurity as a result of
conflict, drought, and other natural disasters, including Burkina Faso,
Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Yemen.
In addition to announcing new humanitarian food assistance
funding, the United States will issue a Roadmap for the Global Food Security
Call to Action to reflect the outcomes of the ministerial-level meeting,
outlining the commitments that countries have made to address these challenges.
With today’s announcement, the United States has provided
nearly $2.6 billion in emergency food assistance since Russia’s further invasion
of Ukraine began on February 24. This includes nearly $1.7 billion in
humanitarian assistance to respond to worsening food insecurity around the
world. It also includes USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture taking the
extraordinary step to program the full balance of the Bill Emerson Humanitarian
Trust as part of an effort to provide $670 million in food assistance to six
countries facing severe food insecurity: Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, South
Sudan, and Yemen.
The United States is continuing to scale up assistance to
respond to this crisis by increasing emergency food assistance in countries
that have high levels of food insecurity and are vulnerable to price shocks. We
are also continuing to call on other donors to increase funding to prevent this
global food security crisis from getting even worse and use data analysis to
project the potential impacts of the crisis on countries with existing
humanitarian emergencies.