They are among some 16 million Yemenis – more than half the population of the Arabian Peninsula country – that the United Nations says are going hungry. Of those, five million are on the brink of famine, U.N. aid chief Mark Lowcock warns.

 

On Monday the United Nations hopes to raise some $3.85 billion at a virtual pledging event to avert what Lowcock says would be a large-scale “man-made” famine, the worst the world will have seen for decades.

 

More than six years of war in Yemen – widely seen as a proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran – have sent the impoverished country spiraling into what the United Nations describes as the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

 

Some 80% of Yemenis need help, with 400,000 children under the age of five severely malnourished, according to U.N. data. For much of its food, the country relies on imports that have been badly disrupted over the years by all warring parties.

 

“Before the war Yemen was a poor country with a malnutrition problem, but it was one which had a functioning economy, a government that provided services to quite a lot of its people, a national infrastructure and an export base,” Lowcock told reporters. “The war has largely destroyed all of that.”

 

“In the modern world famines are basically about people having no income and then other people blocking efforts to help them. That’s basically what we’ve got in Yemen,” he added.