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world food program It warned on Friday that hunger in parts of Cameroon could reach catastrophic levels if a funding target of at least $67 million is not met.
Speaking in the capital Yaoundé, Gianluca Ferreira, WFP representative for Cameroon and Sao Tome and Principe, said progress made in the fight against hunger could be reversed without adequate funding.
“Without this funding, most of the activities being implemented by WFP and partners will have to be halted, exposing many risks,” he said.
Cameroon has the world’s most neglected displacement crisis, according to Norwegian Refugee Council Report from earlier this year.
The country is facing several serious crises: the Boko Haram insurgency in the north, separatist insurgencies in two English-speaking regions, and an influx of refugees from the Central African Republic in the east. These crises, combined with climate shocks, have created a displacement crisis and worsened the horrors of hunger.
More than 3.3 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance and more than 2 million are internally displaced, according to WFP.
Ferreira said more than 52,000 children would no longer receive school meals from January due to a lack of funding. WFP will also reduce operations, with five of its offices in Cameroon at risk of closing. This will put more than half a million people at risk of losing food and nutrition assistance.
“So we can go backward instead of forward,” he said.
In 2022, WFP received $106 million in funding for Cameroon, but this year the amount is just $20 million.
These funding shortfalls follow the Trump administration’s unprecedented rollback of US foreign aid, which totaled $64 billion in 2023, the last year comprehensive figures were available.
For the Trump administration, USAID’s closure was a cause for celebration. In July, the Secretary of State marco rubio That said, the agency has little to show since the end of the Cold War.
However, in a Lancet medical study published in July, researchers credited USAID programs with preventing 91 million deaths in the first two decades of this century alone.
