The UN warns that water and food reserves in Mariupol are almost depleted

Geneva, 18 Mar The water and food reserves of the inhabitants of Mariupol, a city in southeastern Ukraine besieged by Russian troops two weeks ago, are running out and humanitarian aid has hardly been allowed in at this time, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned today. “The only way to assist Mariupol is through humanitarian convoys, which have so far failed to enter,” said WFP's emergency coordinator for Ukraine Jakob Kern, on a videoconference from Krakow, Poland. Other partially enclosed cities such as Kharkiv, Kiev, Odessa or Sumy are being able to receive help from the United Nations program, which has mobilized supplies to feed three million people for a month, the WFP official said at a press conference. The humanitarian agency has already managed to send 12,000 tons of this aid to different areas of Ukraine, and another 8,000 tons are waiting in nearby countries to be able to access that country. Kern also expressed WFP's concern about the impact the war can have on global food security, given that Russia and Ukraine are major producers and exporters, especially of cereals, and the conflict between the two has pushed world food prices to record numbers. “The consequences of the conflict are spreading and will cause a collateral wave of hunger on the planet,” warned the WFP official. Russia and Ukraine account for almost 30 per cent of world trade in wheat, the cereal that is the basis of food in many countries and that since the beginning of the war has increased its price on the global market by 24 per cent. Ukraine is the fourth largest producer of this cereal in the world and is also in the top three in corn, barley and sunflower oil, according to WFP. Kern noted that the regions whose food security is most vulnerable to the current war are Africa and the Middle East, where a country like Lebanon, for example, imported 60 per cent of its wheat from Ukraine. CHIEF abc/ah