World Food Programme
The Food Aid Organisation of the United Nation System
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Time running out for Iraqi children

World Food Programme, News Update.
26 September, 1995

Alarming food shortages are causing irreparable damage to an entire generation of Iraqi children, a WFP emergency officer said Tuesday, reporting on the prevalence of stunting among toddlers, many with "old man's faces" in a country where "nearly everyone seems to be emaciated".

"After 24 years in the field, mostly in Africa starting with Biafra, I didn't think anything could shock me" said Dieter Hannusch, WFP's Chief Emergency Support Officer, on his return from a 2-week assessment mission in Iraq. "But this was comparable to the worst Scenarios I have ever seen."

Because of the desperate situation and despite bleak donor prospects, WFP decided to double its target beneficiary population from 1.02 million to 2.15 million. To keep those people alive during 1996, WFP will require 310,579 metric tons of food at a cost of US$ 122.5 million.

"There actually are more than 4 million people, a fifth of Iraq's population at severe nutritional risk" said Mona Hammam, WFP's regional Manager. "That number included 2.4 million children under five, about 600,000 pregnant/nursing women and destitute women heads of households as well as hundreds of thousands of elderly without anyone to help them. But we are not going to get the money we need to help them all so we are going to donors with numbers that have been paired down to the bone."

Donor reluctance to fully fund the 1995 appeal, coupled with logistics problems caused by fighting between factions in the north, has forced WFP to continually slash its beneficiary lists until it was reaching less than half of the targetted beneficiaries.

"I met one women, a widow with four children, who had been taken off the beneficiary list because her son was in the militia and earned one dollar a month," Hannusch said. "That put her in a category considered to be well off"

Although the 1995 harvest is about 16% below average, the decreased production has little effect on the food situation of a nation that traditionally imported 70% of its food needs.

"The country was flooded in oil, it did not take agriculture seriously and only about 30% of the population, mostly in the north, were involved in agriculture" said Hannusch. "Blaming the current hanger situation in Iraq on a bad harvest is like saying there will be famine in Switzerland because of a bad crop year."

The main problem, according to Hannusch is that money has lost its value in Iraq and 70% of the population has little or no access to food because of their almost total lack of purchasing power.

"The market price of subsistence foods for a family of five is about US$ 26 a month," said Hannusch. "The average wage earner in the south makes between US$ 3 and US$ 5 a month. If you are a university professor, you might make US$ 9."

Salaries are higher in the north, Hannusch said, but so too are food prices.

The only thing that kept people in the south from outright starvation Hannush said, was the government ration that covered only about 50% of their minimum calorie requirements with a serious lack of protein. Even this minimal support does not extent to the people in the north.

"Up and until now, the middle classes survived by selling every thing they owned at ridiculously low prices' Hannusch said. "But now their assets are depleted, they have nothing left to sell. They are getting hungrier and hungrier. Nearly every one seems to be emaciated."

The team reported that the pediatric wards of functioning hospitals housed "extreme cases of malnutrition hardly ever seen in any other chronically food deficit country." Lack of protein is causing irreversible damage to both the physical and mental health of small children, it said.

The incidence of severe malnourishment and stunting among children under the age of five was reported to be about 29% comparable to that of Mali. Many children exhibited the "old man's faces" that signal marasmus. The Iraqi government reported an infant mortality rate of 92 per thousand life births and an under five mortality rate of 128 per thousand life births, comparable to the situation in Sudan.

"We are at the point of no return in Iraq," said Hannusch. "More and more people spend their whole day struggling to find food for survival.

The social fabric of the nation is disintegrating. People have exhausted their ability to cope.

"If help does not come soon, the survivors will be the sanction-breakers, the blackmarketeers and the thieves."

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