The United Nations World Food Program, which until the end of February provided food aid to people in war-affected areas in the Donbas, is now shutting down its operations in Ukraine due to a lack of funding, the agency said on March 14.
The decision came four years into Russia’s war on Ukraine, with the number of those affected by a lack of food still on the rise.
The agency said it was no longer able to offer an effective response to the humanitarian crisis in the Donbas.
“The conflict has exacerbated pre-existing systemic flaws in the country, such as unemployment and poverty,” the program’s country director in Ukraine Dorte Ellehammer said. “Our assessment showed that the humanitarian needs remain high in the conflict area, but helping them requires more development action than our agency’s mandate and funding can fulfil.”
Ellehammer added that it had become harder to keep donors interested in continuing food aid to Donbas civilians. “Unlike Yemen, South Sudan and other countries where people suffer from acute hunger, Ukraine is, in fact, large agricultural producer and exporter,” she said.
Another factor that contributed to donors’ reluctance to allocate more funds was the program’s limited access to the Russia-controlled territories. As a result, the agency worked through local partners and couldn’t fully monitor how well the money was spent.
“Many humanitarian agencies face the same problem, where it is difficult to distinguish adversities caused by war from systemic social and economic issues,” Ellehammer said.
In more than three years of work, the World Food Program delivered food to over 1 million people in eastern Ukraine, where Russia’s war has destroyed infrastructure and disrupted markets. The program provided them with a daily ration of food staples or cash and vouchers to buy food in places where local markets functioned. The program ran until the end of February 2018.
The Kremlin-backed war in the Donbas has already killed over 10,300 Ukrainians, with over 2,500 civilians being among them, according to U.N. figures. The war has directly affected 4.4 million people, who have lost their homes and loved ones or whose quality of life has drastically changed. Besides the fighting, Ukraine suffered from a massive economic recession in 2014-2015, with the national currency, the hryvnia losing two-thirds of its value against the dollar.
The program reported that 3.4 million people in eastern Ukraine are still in need of humanitarian aid, and at least a third of them struggle to put food on their tables.
The number of people suffering from food insecurity doubled last year.
“It is a cumulative consequence of a conflict, which has lasted longer than expected, and the economic crisis,” Ellehammer said. “Some people have exhausted their savings, some lost their jobs.”
