ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — 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.
The World Bank warned towards the end of 2020 that the poverty rate in Iraq will increase by seven to 14 percent in the short-term because of the fall in oil prices and the negative economic effects of the pandemic – putting up to 5.5 million Iraqis are at risk of falling below the poverty lines.
