GENEVA (Reuters) - Millions of people caught up in armed conflicts will be pinched hard by the global food crisis, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which vowed on Tuesday to sustain aid to 52 countries.
By Stephanie Nebehay
GENEVA (Reuters) - Millions of people caught up in armed conflicts will be pinched hard by the global food crisis, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which vowed on Tuesday to sustain aid to 52 countries.
The Swiss-based humanitarian agency said it was stepping up food distributions in Yemen and Somalia, where rising commodity prices and fighting are taking a heavy toll on the destitute.
"The recent rise in food and fuel prices is making life even harder for poor people already struggling to cope with the effects of war and internal violence," ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger said in a statement accompanying its annual report.
!ADVERTISEMENT!Other war- and poverty-stricken countries such as Afghanistan, Chad and Haiti are also strongly affected, he said.
World prices of basic food commodities have risen steeply in the last year, sparking riots in some countries and potentially forcing millions more people into hunger and malnutrition, according to United Nations agencies.
The ICRC spent 944 million Swiss francs ($919 million) last year for relief projects in hotspots including Iraq and Sudan where basic services such as healthcare have largely collapsed, according to the report.
Worldwide, it operated water and sanitation projects that benefited more than 14 million people, and provided supplies to reinforce health care facilities that treated nearly 2.9 million patients last year.
Sudan, where it deploys more than 1,500 staff, was the ICRC's single largest operation in 2007 for the fourth straight year, with a budget of 94 million Swiss francs ($92 million).
In the troubled western state of Darfur, where government troops and rebels have been fighting since 2003, the ICRC is one of the few humanitarian groups working in remote rural areas.
It stepped in to run several camps teeming with displaced people, including Gereida in South Darfur which holds 130,000 people, when other aid agencies left after an attack in 2006.
The ICRC said it was using mobile surgical teams to fly to hard to reach and highly insecure areas such as Chad and Sudan.
It is also building wells in villages in Afghanistan, Chad, Somalia and elsewhere to provide people with safe drinking water and avoid the need for girls or women to venture out to fetch water, a task which makes them vulnerable to sexual violence.
Worldwide last year, the agency visited 2,400 places of detention holding more than 500,000 detainees. Those include suspects detained at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba, and at American prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The aim of such visits, based on a confidential dialogue with detainees and the detaining authorities, is to prevent detainees from disappearing or being ill-treated and to ensure that they have decent conditions of detention," the ICRC said.
(Editing by Catherine Evans)
