David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Program, yesterday reiterated his call for resources to supply food aid, to avert starvation amidst world hunger now threatening more than 130 million people with possible starvation due to pandemic food disruptions. Beasley spoke from South Carolina on Nov. 19 to CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
On the scale of the crisis: “There’s about 36 countries now, that we feed 30 million people, that they depend on us 100%. We assist about 100 million people on any given day, week or month right now around the world, we need to move that number up to about 138 million. But there are three dozen countries…. Let me just hit a few, Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, Northeast Nigeria, D.R.C., and I could keep going from country to country to country around the world…. This is what we’re looking at — we’re looking at famines, destabilization and mass migration. You know, if people in the United States are struggling for food, you can imagine what is happening in Niger, Burkina Faso or South Sudan.”
Beasley said that people are forced into emigration if they can’t eat. In the Syrian mass outmigration, for example, the European leaders did not step in at the right time, at the right place. “Syria was a nation of about 20 million people. The cost of supporting the Syrians in Syria is about 50 cents per day. That same Syrian ends up in Berlin or Brussels or London, it is EU50 to EU100 per day. And we know that people don’t want to leave home. But if they don’t have food and they don’t have some degree of peace and stability, they will do what any of us would do for our children.”
