In addition to diverting the attention of governments and the public, there is mounting evidence that the war in Ukraine will worsen crises around the world. diverting development aid at the same time that it provokes the price of some goods spiral.
Daniel Maxwell, the Henry J. Leir Professor of Food Security at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, said the war was taking a toll on countries already struggling to deal with soaring wheat and corn.
“The invasion of Ukraine has had all these collateral effects in terms of price and therefore makes all those crises more serious because they are all food importing countries,” he said.
“With all the attention in the media and the kind of geopolitical priorities that Ukraine comprises, I think the amount of additional assistance for other parts of the world will be quite limited,” Maxwell said. “We should be able to think about two problems at once. But I’m not sure there’s evidence that we’re doing it completely.”
In Yemen, conflict has raged since a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf states launched an attack against Houthi insurgents in 2015.
The already impoverished nation has endured famine, illness Y poverty since then.
“Many families have not seen fruit or vegetables for months, meat for longer,” said Sukaina Sharafuddin, a Yemeni aid worker. “I met a mother with five children and I asked her what she feeds them. She said that some days she just boils spiced water and they drink it because there is no food for a proper meal.”
Mardini warned that essential services such as health care and sanitation “are on the brink of collapse” across the country.
United Nations fundraising conference for Yemen in March garnered pledges of $1.3 billion in humanitarian assistance. Although this was welcomed by the organizers, it amounted to less than a third of what the UN says is neededmaking 2022 the sixth year that Yemen’s aid response has not been fully funded.
In March, the Emergency Committee for Disasters, a coalition of British aid agencies, launched an appeal for Ukraine that raised $240 million in its first two weeks. The equivalent appeal for Yemen, in December 2016, raised $36 million.
Sharafuddin said the disparity in public fundraising was because people in donor countries “feel more connected to what’s going on in Ukraine.”
“When they hear about Yemen, they focus on the political coverage, what worries them or scares them,” he said. “The reality is that underneath all of this, the victims are real people. My opinion, as a Yemeni and as a mother, is that if the governments got involved, this could all end tomorrow.”
The humanitarian community has long struggled to bring public attention to crises that drag on endlessly, such as the Syrian civil war, which has just entered its eleventh year.
Whether it’s donor fatigue or a lack of media coverage, audiences are increasingly struggling to keep their attention on multiple disasters at once, according to Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, a philosophy professor at the University of Dakota. North.
She said the advent of 24-hour news and social media has left people inundated with information that may or may not be relevant to their interests, squeezing their bandwidth and effectively “training us to jump from topic to topic.” .
“That’s not to mention the emotional and mental psychological capacity to resolve and feel effective in responding to these multiple crises, many of which are global in scale,” Rozelle-Stone said. “Many of us in our local context feel powerless to even begin to address something like what is happening in Ukraine.”
The media is also not necessarily equipped to provide coverage of ongoing disasters.
Susan D. Moeller, a professor of media and international affairs at the University of Maryland and author of “Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death,” said news organizations struggle to retain audience interest. in long-term events.
“The media doesn’t cover stasis well. Things that just broke that we would consider an immediate crisis, whether it’s an earthquake or an assassination, the news jumps out to cover it,” he said. “By the fifth month or fifth year of an ongoing conflict, it usually goes away.”
Without readily available coverage, members of the public are far less likely to be aware of a given humanitarian crisis, let alone press its leaders to act on it.
The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years, leaving millions at risk of starvation. However, a poll Last week, a commission from the Christian Aid charity found that only 23 per cent of those surveyed had heard of the crisis.
This compares with 91 percent who said they were aware of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Abdikarim Mohamed, the ICRC’s regional spokesman for East Africa, said people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya now depend almost entirely on state-backed aid “because people just don’t seem interested” in helping.
“Yes, this topic is not new. Yes, there is donor fatigue,” she said. “But the scale of the problem is now reaching levels where we need governments to focus on trying to prevent these people from dying.”
Reference-www.nbcnews.com