The United States is stepping up to buy about 150,000 metric tons of grain from Ukraine in the next few weeks for an upcoming shipment of food aid from ports no longer blockaded by war, the World Food Program chief has told The Associated Press.
The final destinations for the grain are not confirmed and discussions continue, David Beasley said. But the planned shipment, one of several the UN agency that fights hunger is pursuing, is more than six times the amount of grain that the first WFP-arranged ship from Ukraine is now carrying toward people in the Horn of Africa at risk of starvation.
“I think there's a high probability we'll have a declaration of famine” in the coming weeks, Beasley said. Ukraine was the source of half the grain that WFP bought last year to feed 130 million hungry people. Russia and Ukraine signed agreements with the UN and the Turkish government last month to enable exports of Ukrainian grain for the first time since Russia's invasion in February.
He asserted the World Food Program could save “millions of lives” with just one day of Gulf countries' oil profits.“China's the second-largest economy in the world, and we get diddly-squat from China,” or very little, he added. Some of the world's poorest people without enough food are in northern Kenya, where animal carcasses are slowly stripped to the bone beneath an ungenerous sky. Millions of livestock, the source of families' wealth and nutrition, have died in the drought. Many water pumps have gone dry. More and more thousands of children are malnourished.
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