World Food Program warns of catastrophic hunger in Cameroon without additional funding

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YAOUNDE, Cameroon (AP) — The World Food Program warned Friday that hunger could reach catastrophic levels in parts of Cameroon if a funding target of at least $67 million is not met.

Speaking in the capital Yaoundé, Gianluca Ferrera, the WFP representative for Cameroon and Sao Tome and Principe, said progress made in the fight against hunger could be reversed without adequate funding.

“Without this funding, most of the activities that WFP and partners have been implementing will have to stop, bringing forward a number of risks,” he said.

Cameroon is the world’s most neglected displacement crisis, according to a Norwegian Refugee Council report from earlier this year.

The country faces several severe crises: Boko Haram insurgency in the north, a separatist uprising in the two English-speaking regions, and the influx of refugees from the Central African Republic in the east. These crises, combined with climatic shocks, have created a displacement crisis and worsened the specter of hunger.

Over 3.3 million people require humanitarian assistance and more than 2 million are internally displaced according to the WFP.

Ferrera said over 52,000 children will no longer receive school meals starting in January due to a lack of funds. The WFP will also scale down operations with the risk of shutting down five of its offices in Cameroon. This will put over half a million people at risk of losing food and nutrition assistance.

“So we may go backward instead of going forward,” he said.

In 2022, the WFP received funding worth $106 million for Cameroon, but this year, the amount is merely $20 million.

These funding shortages come after the Trump administration championed an unprecedented withdrawal of U.S. foreign aid, which totaled $64 billion in 2023, the last year with comprehensive figures available.

For the Trump administration, the closure of USAID was a cause for celebration. In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the agency had little to show for itself since the end of the Cold War.

However, a in a Lancet medical study published in July, researchers credited USAID programs with preventing 91 million deaths in the first two decades of this century alone.