Adedapo Adesanya
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has disclosed that timely and robust actions can reduce hunger and human suffering especially for households in the wake of the disruptions caused by COVID-19.
This was noted by the Director-General of the agency, Mr Qu Dongyu, at a high-level pledging event for the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), the second-largest donor to FAO’s humanitarian programme.
He explained that the shocks of 2020 will reverberate long into 2021 largely due to the extraordinary challenges faced this year from the pan-continental desert locust upsurge to the global pandemic.
He said the number of people facing emergency levels of acute food insecurity may rise further unless the appropriate bodies act urgently.
FAO is strongly advocating investment in emergency agriculture interventions as four out of five people living in food crisis contexts rely on some form of agriculture for their survival.
“Rescuing those livelihoods not only saves their lives today but gives them hope for tomorrow,” the Director-General said.
FAO’s Director-General hailed CERF for its influential actions, including helping the organisation to scale up initiatives to reduce the impact of crises in Bangladesh and Somalia as well as for catalyzing funding for FAO’s Desert Locust control operations, which have secured enough food in the horn of Africa and Yemen to feed more than 16 million people for a year.
On his part, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr Antonio Guterres, said it was necessary to act quickly and at scale.
He emphasised that the CERF was only half-way to reaching its target of $1 billion for 2020 but added that momentum was building for this anticipatory approach.
The Secretary-General highlighted early action to combat the desert locust in the Horn of Africa, led by FAO with a grant and loan from the fund, as one of CERF’s outstanding impacts during a record-setting year of work.
The annual event was convened by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and chaired by its chief, Mark Lowcock, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. More than 100 ministers participated, many pledging new resources.
CERF was established by the United Nations General Assembly and launched in 2006 with the objectives of promoting early action and response to reduce the loss of life, enhance response to time-critical requirements and strengthen core elements of humanitarian response in underfunded crises.
