DR Congo: As Ebola spreads in Eastern DRC, WFP warns food, livelihoods and access are critical to containing outbreak

This is a summary of what was said by the World Food Programme’s (WFP) Country Director for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), David Stevenson, to whom quoted text may be attributed – at a press briefing in Geneva today. GENEVA/KINSHASA - Thank you, and good morning. Let me start with the bigger picture. Ebola is spreading in eastern DRC in the middle of one of the world’s largest hunger crises. Across the country, 26.5 million people — almost one in four Congolese — do not have enough food. More than 3.6 million people are already facing emergency levels of hunger. And in North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri and Tanganyika alone, nearly 10 million people are struggling to put food on the table. So this outbreak is not only a health emergency. It is a humanitarian crisis. And we will not contain it with medical measures alone. When people are hungry, when they have lost their livelihoods, or when markets stop functioning, they move. They move to find food. They move to find work. They move to find safety. And those movements can make it much harder to stop the virus. At the same time, active conflict is pushing people into affected health zones. And insecurity and access constraints are making it harder for humanitarian teams to reach the communities who need help most. I want to give you one example. Our frontline team recently met Jacques, an internally displaced father whose five-year-old daughter died from Ebola. He had fled fighting in Bukavu and walked for days to reach Beni. He thought he had escaped the worst. Then his daughter developed a high fever and started bleeding from her ears. He rushed her to hospital, but she did not survive. Two weeks later, his wife is still in an isolation centre. WFP is providing hot meals there so patients and contacts can stay under observation — without having to leave to look for food. Jacques is now caring for their 13 family members with WFP food assistance. But he asked us a very simple, very painful question: “With all these children, this one-month ration will only last two weeks. After that, how am I supposed to feed them when I have no means to do so?” That is why food assistance is not separate from the Ebola response. It is part of containment. It helps people stay in care. It helps contacts remain under observation. It reduces the pressure on families to move. And it gives health teams the time and space they need to do their work. We are also seeing the economic pressure build. In Bunia, the epicentre of the outbreak, families already hit by conflict, displacement and hunger are facing another shock. Border closures, movement restrictions and trade disruptions linked to Ebola are driving up food and fuel prices. WFP has moved quickly. Since the outbreak began, we have provided more than 36,000 hot meals in Ebola treatment centres, take-home rations to 2,600 in North Kivu and Ituri, and monthly food to 14,000 people in ten quarantined villages in South Kivu affected by the outbreak. Our logistics teams and UNHAS flights have also been central to the wider response; moving more than 1,750 first responders and more than 300 metric tons of essential cargo, so frontline operations can keep going in hard-to-reach areas. But we need to do more - and we need to do it faster, at scale, and with the resources required. We need safe and sustained access. We need to stabilize food and livelihoods, so people are not forced to move simply to survive. And we need timely, flexible funding to keep food assistance, supply chains, logistics and aviation support running for as long as this crisis demands. WFP now requires USD72 million for our direct Ebola response and USD286 million for emergency food assistance across eastern DRC. For families like Jacques’, this is very real. Food helps keep people in care. Logistics keep responders moving. Access turns plans into action. If we move quickly now, we have a better chance of containing Ebola — and preventing an already severe humanitarian crisis from getting worse. Thank you. # # #