LONDON: The UN’s World Food Programme on Thursday repeated its warning over the energy and food shock arising from the Iran war, raising the alarm that 45 million people worldwide could be pushed into hunger.
It came during a briefing by Carl Skau, acting executive director of WFP, which has been blighted by funding gaps amid a series of worsening country-specific crises.
However, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz serves as the lynchpin of the global threat to food and energy security, he said, warning of disastrous consequences if oil remains around or above $100 per barrel until July.
“The correlation between the price of energy and food is so tight in many places, and also in the poorest countries people are already spending all their money on food,” he said at the briefing at UN headquarters in New York City.
Skau has seen the effects firsthand through visits to Afghanistan, Lebanon and Sudan, while WFP has warned of dire food-security conditions in Somalia and Sri Lanka.
