Drei Millionen Irakis haben nicht genug Nahrung

Die Lage im Irak verschlechtert sich weiter, während zugleich erneut Protestierende von Sicherheitskräften in Nassiriyah im Süden des Landes erschossen wurden. So sieht die Realität über ein Jahr nach dem Beginn der Massenproteste in einem Land aus, dass mit über die größten Ölvorräte der Welt verfügt:

About three million Iraqis are not consuming enough food, the World Food Programme (WFP) representative in Iraq told state media on Thursday.

"About 3 million people in Iraq suffer from insufficient food consumption, and this includes 731,000 food-insecure IDPs and returnees,"  Abdulrahman Mejaj said.

The figures provided by Mejaj mean that almost half of the estimated 1.3 million Iraqis who are currently internally displaced are suffering from food insecurity.

WFP's Hunger Monitoring System found in November 2020 that around 2.6 million people – roughly seven percent of Iraq’s total population – had “insufficient levels of food consumption”.

Food insufficiency is usually due to poverty or difficulty in accessing food. Insufficient food intake can inhibit growth and cognitive development in children, who make up over 40 percent of the Iraqi population.

Iraq’s poverty rate stood at about 20 percent before the coronavirus pandemic – but UNICEF warned in July 2020 that and additional 11.7 percent of Iraqis were at risk of falling below the poverty line, because of further economic hardship caused by the coronavirus pandemic.