UNICEF

Famine in Yemen

The Committee: The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) is an agency within the United Nations that is responsible worldwide for providing humanitarian aid for children in need. UNICEF collaborates with other United Nations agencies to be the world’s leading source of humanitarian assistance and support for those in struggling countries. It provides disadvantaged children with support through various programs that distribute vaccines, provide safe water, control sanitation, and protect mothers and their children from violence. UNICEF has led numerous programs to support struggling people throughout the world, some programs being targeting the AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa for the past decade, helping to prevent childhood diseases like malaria, pneumonia, and tuberculosis globally, and providing children in Africa with equal access to education from age six.

The Topic: The main concern in this committee is the ongoing famine in Yemen. Throughout the aforementioned civil war, the Houthis have targeted the vast wheat fields in Yemen. Yemen produces, on average, over 150 tons of wheat per year. In the 2023-2024 year, that number lowered to under 100 tons. They have bombed and obliterated fields to the extreme, where a majority of lands are no longer fertile to support crop growth. This leaves the Yemeni people helpless with no reliable source of nourishment, recently reaching a new peak as prices for wheat and grain become unbearably high. A second topic is that of women and children. Majority of those impacted by this crisis are women and children. Many displaced households are led by females alone, as three-quarters of all displaced people in Yemen are women and children. Even worse, twenty percent of these women are under the age of 18. Children are most susceptible to the illnesses and diseases brought on by the extreme conditions they are forced to live under. More than 2.7 million Yemeni children are malnourished and approximately fifty percent of children under the age of five experience chronic malnourishment. Resulting from the terror and destruction of this civil war, millions of Yemenis have been ousted from their homes for nearly a decade. Yemen has been found to have one of the highest rates of internal displacement crisis in the world, meaning that Yemeni citizens have been repeatedly displaced more than almost all other populations over the past few years. It is estimated that there are over 4.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Yemen.