MUN Position Paper
Country: Republic of Yemen
Committee: General Assembly: Second Committee
Delegate: Miles Stanton
Opening Statement
Coming back to the tent you and your family call home, after a long day of hard work
your stomach is growling. You search everywhere but no food to be found. Instead feeling all
this pain you lay down to rest because your body can't take it anymore. About 42% of Yemens
population faces poverty and hunger. According to the United Nations Official website The
world needs to produce at least 50% more food to feed 9 billion people by 2050. We are going
to need to produce that much more food, but Yemen, we only produce around 15% of our own
food because of our terrain. We need to use our modern day technology to find ourselves a way
to become more self sustainable.
National Actions
Food security is a pretty serious problem in the Republic of Yemen. According to an
article on the website Made for Minds It says that in 2012; 2.2 million children alone we're
facing severe hunger and were in need of care. And a shocking and horrifying statistic of 1 child
dying every 10 minutes. Yemen relies on support from various organizations to help with this
food problem such as, the World Food Programme (WFP). On the official website for the World
Food Programme It states In 2015 WFP provided food assistance to over 6 million people
every other month in 19 out of 22 Yemeni governorates, with plans to expand to 7 million in
2017. And you can always get better but for this starting out its very good progress and this
program will continue to get better and do more and more for the people of Yemen and all over
the world.
UN Actions and International Actions
Almost all of the action going into fighting hunger comes from UN and other types of programs
that get food for people who don't have access to it. Such as, WFP, Global Agriculture and Food
Security Programme (GAFSP), Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO) and a few more.
World Food Programme, I've talked a little bit about what they've done earlier but I didn't
mention the fact that The 2017 Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan shows that about
3.3 million children and pregnant or nursing women are acutely malnourished, including
462,000 children under 5 suffering from severe acute malnutrition. This information was
received from the WFP website and it shocks me to hear it but the WFP is lessening
those numbers and they are making a real difference.
On the FAO website it says that a few main things they are working on are; Improved
efficiency of the agro-food sector and enhanced agricultural and fisheries production and
productivity, food safety and food and nutrition security And if this is done we'll this
could be a key component in making food accessible for people and it would open up
opportunities for a lot more people to have access to food.
A lot of all these starving people were put here in this situation because of the Civil War
that Yemen is facing that is leaving their country war torn. Since this is obviously causing most
of these problems that is the main focus of the Yemeni government.
Recommendation for Action
Yemen is occupied with the civil war going on and we are putting most of our resources
into that (which isn't very much anyway). We are a developing country so we will need help from
countries who can spare food such as the United States. We ask all of you to consider
contributing to our food crisis directly or help funding the programs I mentioned before, that are
supporting us. One idea that I believe could be extremely beneficial now and in the long run is,
trying to modify different crops and make them easier and more efficient in grow in our climate
and terrain because it's extremely difficult to grow our own crops but if we were to genetically
modify crops we could create lots more farmland and do a big part in solving hunger in the
Republic of Yemen.
Sources:
Welle, Deutsche. UN agency reports 2.2 million Yemeni children hungry and in need of care |
news | DW.COM | 12.12.2016. DW.COM, Dec. 2001. Web. 16 Feb. 2017.
FAO country profiles: Yemen. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States. 2015.
Web. 16 Feb. 2017.
Yemen. GAFSP. 2014. Web. 16 Feb. 2017.
