Food Insecurity: WFP prioritizes 3.4 Mn people

COLOMBO (News 1st); The World Food Program said that 3.4 million people are being prioritized to receive emergency assistance from WFP in 2022.

In September, WFP aims to reach 120,716 people. WFP reached 22,000 people with cash assistance in the latest week, that's from the 5th to the 9th of September.

The World Food Program has reached more than 40,000 people so far with cash and voucher assistance since beginning its emergency response to the current crisis.

According to the joint FAO/WFP Crop and Food Security Assessment (CFSAM), without assistance, the food security situation is likely to deteriorate in the upcoming months.

Nearly one-third of the population – 6.3 million people – were estimated to be food insecure in June, according to the joint FAO/WFP Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission (CFSAM), and the latest WFP surveys show that acute food insecurity worsened further in the subsequent months.

Without food assistance, the food security situation is expected to deteriorate further, due to poor harvest forecasts of staple foods, import restrictions, and the ongoing economic crisis.

A substantial proportion of markets are reporting concerns around rising and/or unstable prices, according to WFP’s recently released Market Functionality Index (MFI) report for August., and these high prices threaten to further impact food security, with two in five households already spending over 75 percent of their income on food.