This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.

UNICEF highlights devastating mental health dangers for Ukraine children

UN humanitarians on Friday said that they were urgently ramping up efforts to provide vulnerable children with specialist and psychosocial support, amid “tremendous” mental health needs and other dangers linked to the Russian invasion.

Aaron Greenberg, the UN Children Fund’s regional child protection advisor for Europe and Central Asia, said that the agency was anticipating numbers in terms of all forms of violence against children to be in the tens of thousands.

Before 24 February, Ukraine’s orphanages, boarding schools and other institutions for youngsters housed more than 91,000 children, around half with disabilities. Today, only around one-third of that number have returned home, including those evacuated from the east and south, Mr. Greenberg said:

“If you start doing the math, there are children who remain in institutions who were not evacuated either internally or externally, and there are children in foster care families whose payments were temporarily interrupted, and there are children in guardianship arrangements, a significant number, so…the number of children in need who were vulnerable pre-crisis and whose now vulnerabilities have been accelerated, is incredibly high.”

Throughout Ukraine, UNICEF has 56 deployed mobile units to provide specialised health services to traumatised children.

There are also 12 “dedicated violence mobile teams in the east”, where fighting is ongoing and these units have worked with 7,000 cases of specific violence involving women and children.

Already reeling from COVID-19, Africa now at risk from Ukraine escalation

Staying with Ukraine and its impact in Africa is likely to be significant and worrying, UN development experts have warned.

Ahunna Eziakonwa, Director of the UN Development Programme’s Africa bureau, told journalists in Geneva that the COVID-19 pandemic had already created “immense discontent” across the continent.

Tens of millions of people have been pushed into poverty by the impact of the coronavirus and the result has been that democracy has been “pushed back”, Ms. Eziakonwa insisted.

The virus has also complicated efforts to overcome insecurity and violence, the UNDP official continued, in reference to the violent extremism and climate shocks that have destabilized vast areas of the Sahel region in recent years.

“We have never experienced greater pressure and challenge in our ability to sustain peace and development and a healthy planet as we experience today. A global pandemic that upended the world and changed it forever. We’ve seen resulting from that but also in terms of pre-existing conditions rising poverty and inequality.”

UNDP economist Raymond Gilpin, added that Africa’s dependence on imports of food, fuel, medicines and consumer goods made it particularly vulnerable to rising global inflation.

This was likely to lead to tensions and there was a “distinct possibility” that these might spill over into violent protests, Mr. Gilpin added.

World food prices fall slightly in April after previous month’s spike

The average cost of basic foods decreased slightly last month after a large price hike in March, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Friday.

Modest falls in the price of vegetable oils and cereals drove the FAO food price index down 0.8 per cent, from the all-time high reached in March, the UN agency explained.

For other foodstuffs, including rice, meat, dairy and sugar, prices increased slightly, and food costs today are still almost 30 per cent higher than they were 12 months ago, which continues to pose a challenge to global food security for the most vulnerable.

FAO’s Cereal Price Index shed 0.7 points in April, nudged downwards by falling world maize prices.

But wheat prices increased by 0.2 per cent and were “strongly affected” by the continued Russian blockade of ports in Ukraine and concerns over crop conditions in the US, said FAO, which explained that these concerns were tempered by larger wheat exports from India and higher-than-expected shipments from Russia, which increased by 0.2 per cent.

Daniel Johnson, UN News.