The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced on Tuesday the purchase of Ukrainian wheat worth 68 million dollars which will go to the UN program to combat hunger in poor countries.
(Read here: War in Ukraine: nuclear operator denounces an ‘unprecedented’ cyberattack)
In a statement, USAID administrator Samantha Power explained that they will acquire 150,000 metric tons of grain and that they will be sent to countries suffering from “severe hunger and malnutrition” in the Horn of Africa, an area affected by a historic drought.
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The administrator also said that although this is a step in the right direction, “much more is needed” to help the world recover from “the global devastation caused by the brutal war” of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The grain will reach needy countries through the UN World Food Program.
For his part, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, took the opportunity to ask all the countries of the world to increase their humanitarian and development aid and to support food security efforts and ease trade restrictions.
“Working together we can ensure global food security,” said the top US diplomat. This same Wednesday it was learned that the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, will travel this week to Ukraine, where he plans to hold a trilateral meeting with the country’s president, Volodímir Zelenski, and with the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The meeting will take place next Thursday in the city of Lviv, and the following day Guterres will visit Odessa and its port, which is being used for the export of Ukrainian grain in accordance with the agreement promoted by the organization itself and Turkey.
Later, the United Nations leader will travel to Istanbul to visit the Joint Coordination Center (JCC, in English) that oversees compliance with that pact, explained his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric.
According to Dujarric, Guterres will travel to Ukraine at the government’s invitation and it is expected that part of the trilateral meeting with Zelenski and Erdogan will focus on reviewing the operation of the initiative that has made it possible to unblock cereal exports through the Black Sea.
In addition, the UN Secretary General plans to hold a bilateral meeting with the Ukrainian president, in which he will a priori address the general state of the conflict, the need for a political solution and other issues, such as the situation at the Zaporizhia nuclear plant and attempts to deploy a mission of international experts to assess it on the ground, the spokesman said.
Guterres already traveled to Ukraine last April, as part of a tour in which he also passed through Turkey and Russia and in which the evacuation of civilians from the besieged Azovstal plant in Mariupol was organized, which took place a few days later with the support from the ONU.
On that trip, the agreement for cereal exports also began to take shape, which took months to crystallize.
EFE
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