The Diplomat
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced yesterday, during his visit to the logistics base of the World Food Program (WFP) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, a 14.4 million euro Shock Plan against the Food Emergency in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa.
“For almost a year now, the war in Ukraine has unleashed a triple crisis that affects fertilizers, hydrocarbons and also the food itself, and the impact is being felt, above all, in regions very close to the Canary Islands and, therefore, to Spain: Sub-Saharan Africa, the Horn of Africa and also the Sahel, in Ethiopia, in South Sudan, in Somalia, in the Sahel, in Yemen,” said Sánchez during his visit, in which he was accompanied by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and the Minister of Health, Carolina Darias.
“The World Food Program is a unique instrument to combat this silent barbarism” that is hunger and, “therefore, for us, from Spain, it is an enormous honor to be able to count on its location on this wonderful island,” he continued. “Together we reach where alone we could not be; and that is why Spain has already increased its contribution by tripling the contributions, going from four million euros to 13 million euros annually,” he recalled.
“Last September,” he continued, “Spain, at the United Nations General Assembly, committed nothing more and nothing less than a major effort of 236 million euros over the next three years to alleviate this food insecurity, exacerbated as a result of Putin’s war in Ukraine.”
“Today I would also like to announce that the Government of Spain is going to reinforce this commitment: we have activated, together with the World Food Program, the Emergency Food Shock Plan, endowed with 14.4 million euros and focused on the following priorities,” said Pedro Sánchez.
This amount, he specified, will consist of 4.4 million Euros to be allocated to the Grains from Ukraine initiative, a program that finances the transfer of Ukrainian cereals to developing countries, and another ten million Euros to be allocated to “priority countries” for Spanish Cooperation: three countries in the Sahel area, Mali, Niger and Mauritania, which will receive 6.5 million Euros, and another three in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Somalia, which will receive 3.5 million Euros. Among those attending the event were several ambassadors and representatives of these countries.
