Lord Oates
Main Page: Lord Oates (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bates, for initiating this debate. I declare my interest as CEO of United Against Malnutrition & Hunger.
As we have heard, the world faces an unprecedented series of humanitarian crises driven by conflict and climate shocks, from the DRC to Myanmar, Palestine to Sudan, Somalia to Yemen and many places in-between. In the face of this staggering human suffering, rather than step up to the plate, the world has chosen to step away, allowing conflict to go unresolved and leading to huge shortfalls in the funding required to provide desperately needed food, medical supplies and access to clean water.
In Sudan, for example, the World Food Programme has a funding shortfall of $662 million. Hospitals are out of critical supplies of basic medicines and emergency therapeutic foods. Last year, speaking to the BBC, Dr Ibrahim Abdullah Khater, a paediatrician at al-Saudi Hospital in El Fasher told the BBC,
“We have many malnourished children admitted in hospital, but unfortunately there is no single sachet”
of therapeutic food. He continued:
“The situation, it is so miserable, it is so catastrophic”.
In the DRC, UNICEF’s level 3 emergency response continues to face severe funding shortfalls, with a 73% gap in health funding and a 42% gap in nutrition funding. Agencies are having to make decisions that, in effect, take from the hungry in order to provide for the starving. This story is repeated in Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan and many other places. The UK’s ability is constrained by our own ODA cuts, so I urge the Government to do all they can to maximise the use of the funds that we have, through innovative mechanisms such as the Child Nutrition Fund and other financing mechanisms.