Around 55 million people in violence-wracked West and Central Africa face acute food insecurity this year, and some are on the verge of famine in northern Nigeria, the United Nations (UN) said, yesterday.
Violence across the region has triggered a hunger crisis that is being exacerbated by aid cuts, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) stated.
According to the WFP, it had had to slash its food assistance in the area as funding dries up.
In West and Central Africa, “a staggering 55 million people will be facing acute food insecurity in the upcoming lean season between June and August 2026”, Jean-Martin Bauer, WFP’s food security and nutrition analysis director, told reporters in Geneva.
Those people are in the crisis, emergency and catastrophe phases of hunger — the three worst of five levels used to assess food insecurity.
The number of people in emergency conditions has doubled since 2020, to three million, he said, adding that 15,000 people in certain areas of Borno state in north-eastern Nigeria are in the catastrophe phase — the first time this level has been reached in a decade.
“This is a group that’s one step away from famine. That does mean that people are dying… people are starving”, Bauer said, speaking from WFP’s headquarters in Rome, Italy.
Borno state is the epicentre of a terrorists insurgency that began in 2009.
