Tag Archives: World Bank

Largest Commodity Shock since the 70’s World Bank warns

Economy Rev 6:6 NAS “And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not damage the oil and the wine.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Ukraine war to cause biggest price shock in 50 years – World Bank
  • The war in Ukraine is set to cause the “largest commodity shock” since the 1970s, the World Bank has warned.
  • Energy prices are set to increase more than 50%, pushing up bills for households and businesses, the World Bank says.
  • The biggest rise will be in the price of natural gas in Europe, which is set to more than double in cost. Prices are forecast to fall next year and in 2024, but even then will remain 15% higher than they were last year.
  • Wheat is forecast to increase 42.7% and reach new record highs in dollar terms.
  • 3% for barley, 20% for soybeans and 29.8% for oils and 41.8% for chicken.

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Health costs pushed or worsened poverty for over 500 million

By Manas Mishra

(Reuters) – More than half a billion people globally were pushed or sent further into extreme poverty last year as they paid for health costs out of their own pockets, with the COVID-19 pandemic expected to make things worse, the World Health Organization and the World Bank said on Sunday.

The pandemic disrupted health services globally and triggered the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, making it even more difficult for people to pay for healthcare, according to a joint statement from both the organizations.

“All governments must immediately resume and accelerate efforts to ensure every one of their citizens can access health services without fear of the financial consequences,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

Tedros urged governments to increase their focus on health care systems and stay on course towards universal health coverage, which the WHO defines as everyone getting access to health services they need without financial hardship.

Healthcare is a major political issue in the United States, one of the few industrialized countries that does not have universal cover for its citizens.

Globally, the pandemic made things worse and immunization coverage dropped for the first time in ten years, with deaths from tuberculosis and malaria increasing.

“Within a constrained fiscal space, governments will have to make tough choices to protect and increase health budgets,” Juan Pablo Uribe, global director for health, nutrition and population at World Bank, said.

(Reporting by Manas Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)

Exclusive-World Bank works to redirect frozen funds to Afghanistan for humanitarian aid only: sources

By Jonathan Landay and Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The World Bank is finalizing a proposal to deliver up to $500 million from a frozen Afghanistan aid fund to humanitarian agencies, people familiar with the plans told Reuters, but it leaves out tens of thousands of public sector workers and remains complicated by U.S. sanctions.

Board members will meet informally on Tuesday to discuss the proposal, hammered out in recent weeks with U.S. and U.N. officials, to redirect the funds from the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), which has a total of $1.5 billion.

Afghanistan’s 39 million people face a cratering economy, a winter of food shortages and growing poverty three months after the Taliban seized power as the last U.S. troops withdrew from 20 years of war.

Afghan experts said the aid will help, but big gaps remain, including how to get the funds into Afghanistan without exposing the financial institutions involved to U.S. sanctions, and the lack of focus on state workers, the sources said.

The money will go mainly to addressing urgent health care needs in Afghanistan, where less than 7% of the population has been vaccinated against the coronavirus, they said.

For now, it will not cover salaries for teachers and other government workers, a policy that the experts say could hasten the collapse of Afghanistan’s public education, healthcare and social services systems. They warn that hundreds of thousands of workers, who have been unpaid for months, could stop showing up for their jobs and join a massive exodus from the country.

The World Bank will have no oversight of the funds once transferred into Afghanistan, said one of the sources familiar with the plans.

“The proposal calls for the World Bank to transfer the money to the U.N. and other humanitarian agencies, without any oversight or reporting, but it says nothing about the financial sector, or how the money will get into the country,” the source said, calling U.S. sanctions a major constraint.

‘NOT A SILVER BULLET’

While the U.S. Treasury has provided “comfort letters” assuring banks that they can process humanitarian transactions, concern about sanctions continues to prevent passage of even basic supplies, including food and medicine, the source added.

“It’s a scorched earth approach. We’re driving the country into the dust,” said the source. Crippling sanctions and failure to take care of public sector workers will “create more refugees, more desperation and more extremism.”

Any decision to redirect ARTF money requires the approval of all its donors, of which the United States has been the largest.

A State Department spokesperson confirmed that Washington is working with the World Bank and other donors on how to use the funds, including potentially paying those who work in “critical positions such as healthcare workers and teachers.”

The spokesperson said the U.S. government remains committed to meeting the  critical needs of the  Afghan people, “especially across health, nutrition, education, and food security sectors … but international aid is not a silver bullet.”

BYPASSING TALIBAN

Established in 2002 and administered by the World Bank, the ARTF was the largest financing source for Afghanistan’s civilian budget, which was more than 70% funded by foreign aid.

The World Bank suspended disbursements after the Taliban takeover. At the same time, Washington stopping supplying U.S. dollars to the country and joined in freezing some $9 billion in Afghan central bank assets and halting financial assistance.

A World Bank spokesperson confirmed that staff and executive board members are exploring redirecting ARTF funds to U.N. agencies “to support humanitarian efforts,” but gave no further details. The United Nations declined to comment.

Initial work has also been done on a potential swap of U.S. dollars for Afghanis to deliver the funds into the country, but those plans are “basically just a few PowerPoint slides at this point,” one of the sources said. That approach would deposit ARTF funds in the international accounts of Afghan private institutions, who would disburse Afghanis from their Afghan bank accounts to humanitarian groups in Afghanistan, two sources said.

This would bypass the Taliban, thereby avoiding entanglement with the U.S. and U.N. sanctions, but the plan is complex and untested, and could take time to implement.

One major problem is the lack of a mechanism to monitor disbursements of funds in Afghanistan to ensure Taliban leaders and fighters do not access them, a third source said.

Two former U.S. officials familiar with internal administration deliberations said that some U.S. officials contend that U.S. and U.N. sanctions on Taliban leaders bar financial aid to anyone affiliated with their government.

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay and Andrea Shalal; Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed and Michelle Nichols; editing by Grant McCool)

Myanmar currency drops 60% in weeks as economy tanks since February coup

(Reuters) – Myanmar’s currency has lost more than 60% of its value since the beginning of September, driving up food and fuel prices in an economy that has tanked since a military coup eight months ago.

Many gold shops and money exchanges closed on Wednesday due to the turmoil, while the kyat’s dive trended on social media with comments ranging from stark warnings to efforts to find some humor as yet another crisis hits the strife-torn nation.

“This will rattle the generals as they are quite obsessed with the kyat rate as a broader barometer of the economy, and therefore a reflection on them,” Richard Horsey, a Myanmar expert at the International Crisis Group, said.

In August, the Central Bank of Myanmar tried tethering the kyat 0.8% either side of its reference rate against the dollar, but gave up on Sept. 10 as pressure on the exchange rate mounted.

The shortage of dollars has become so bad that some money changers have pulled down their shutters.

“Due to the currency price instability at the moment…all Northern Breeze Exchange Service branches are temporarily closed,” the money changer said on Facebook.

Those still operating were quoting a rate of 2,700 kyat per dollar on Tuesday, compared to 1,695 on Sept. 1 and 1,395 back on Feb. 1 when the military overthrew a democratically elected government led by Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

WORLD BANK WARNS ECONOMY TO SLUMP 18%

The World Bank predicted on Monday the economy would slump 18% this year and said Myanmar would see the biggest contraction in employment in the region and the number of poor would rise.

The increasing economic pressures come amid signs of an upsurge in bloodshed, as armed militias have become bolder in clashes with the army after months of protests and strikes by opponents of the junta.

“The worse the political situation is, the worse the currency rate will be,” said a senior executive at a Myanmar bank, who declined to be identified.

Myanmar is also struggling to deal with a second wave of coronavirus infections that started in June with the response by authorities crippled after many health workers joined protests. Reported cases have comes off their highs though the true extent of the outbreak remains unclear.

In the immediate months after the Feb. 1 coup, many people queued up to withdraw savings from banks and some bought gold, but a jewelry merchant in Yangon said many desperate people were now trying to sell their gold.

The central bank gave no reason to why it abandoned its managed float strategy earlier this month, but analysts believe its foreign currency reserves must be seriously depleted.

Central bank officials did not answer calls seeking comment, but World Bank data shows it had just $7.67 billion in reserves at the end of 2020.

After coming off its managed float, the central bank still spent $65 million, buying kyat at a rate of 1,750 to 1,755 per dollar between Sept. 13-27.

The bank executive said the central bank’s efforts had limited impact in a currency market shorn of confidence.

The economic crisis has driven up the price of staples, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said this week that around three million people now require humanitarian assistance in Myanmar, up from one million before the coup.

In a country where gross domestic product per capita was just $1,400 last year, a 48-kg bag of rice now costs 48,000 kyat, or around $18, up nearly 40% since the coup, while gasoline prices have nearly doubled to 1,445 kyat per liter.

“If you have money, you buy gold, you buy dollars, you buy (Thai) baht. If you do not have money, you will starve,” said Facebook user Win Myint in a post.

(Reporting by Reuters Staff; Writing by Ed Davies; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Nick Macfie)

Yellen says more work needed to shore up weaknesses revealed by pandemic

By Andrea Shalal and David Lawder

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said a rapid recovery in the United States would boost overall global growth, but more work was needed to shore up weaknesses the COVID-19 crisis exposed in the non-bank financial sector, global supply chains and the social safety net.

Yellen on Tuesday told leaders of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that the Biden administration had decided to “go big” with its COVID-19 response to avert the negative “scarring” impact of long-lasting unemployment, adding that she hoped the U.S. economy would return to full employment next year.

Speaking during the IMF and World Bank spring meetings, Yellen said the crisis had dealt a huge blow worldwide, and it was the responsibility of advanced economies to ensure that years of progress in reducing poverty were not reversed by the crisis.

“We are going to be careful to learn the lessons of the (global) financial crisis, which is: ‘Don’t withdraw support too quickly,'” Yellen said, “And we would encourage all those developed countries that have the capacity… to continue to support a global recovery for the sake of the growth in the entire global economy.”

Yellen said she hoped global finance officials make progress on approving a new allocation of the IMF’s emergency reserve, or Special Drawing Rights, during the meeting, and said it was critical to tackle global debt issues exacerbated by the crisis.

She also underscored the Biden Administration’s commitment to tackling climate change at home and ensuring the needed “transfer of resources” to enable similar actions in developing countries.

“We need to make sure that we help developing countries meet their climate goals along with their development objectives. And the availability of green finance is critical to that,” she said, noting that addressing climate change would also bring opportunities for investment to the private sector.

Yellen said it was critical to ensure the world was better prepared for the next global health crisis, citing the need to improve the resilience of supply chains and social safety nets around the world.

She said the core banking sector had been strengthened after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, but some areas in the non-bank financial sector “showed tremendous stress” during the pandemic and would require attention.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and David Lawder; Editing by Chris Reese and Dan Grebler)

World Bank threatens to cut Lebanon’s vaccine aid over line-jumping

By Ellen Francis and Laila Bassam

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The World Bank threatened on Tuesday to suspend its multi-million dollar financing for Lebanon’s COVID-19 vaccination drive over politicians jumping the line.

The controversy, which echoed favoritism by elites in other countries as the world rushes to inoculate against the coronavirus, added to frustration among Lebanese over delays and violations in the vaccination campaign.

Local media and politicians said that some lawmakers got shots in parliament on Tuesday – despite not necessarily being in priority groups.

“Upon confirmation of violation, World Bank may suspend financing for vaccines and support for COVID19 response across Lebanon!!” the World Bank’s regional director Saroj Kumar Jha tweeted, saying it would be a breach of the national plan.

“I appeal to all, I mean all, regardless of your position, to please register and wait for your turn.”

The World Bank’s reallocation of $34 million has enabled Lebanon to receive its first two batches of about 60,000 Pfizer-BioNTech doses this month. The bank had said it would monitor the vaccine rollout and warned against favoritism in Lebanon, where decades of waste and corruption brought a financial meltdown and protests.

‘SELFISH’

One lawmaker, who asked not to be named, told Reuters that some older current and former lawmakers, as well as administrative staff, were vaccinated in the parliament hall.

“What’s the big deal? … They’re registered,” he said, referring to an online platform for vaccines. He added that doses were also sent last week to the Baabda palace for President Michel Aoun and about 16 others.

Aoun’s office said it would issue a statement.

Deputy parliament speaker Elie Ferzli, who at 71 is not in the first phase priority group, tweeted that he got a shot.

The doctor who heads Lebanon’s COVID-19 vaccination committee, Abdul Rahman Bizri, said it was unaware vaccines would be sent to parliament. “What happened today is unacceptable,” he told reporters.

Around the nation, outrage spread.

“My grandfather is an 85-year-old decent man suffering from heart and cardiovascular problems. My grandfather is a priority and he still did not get the vaccine,” tweeted Jad al-Hamawi.

“What are you? Bunch of hypocrites. Selfish. Criminals.”

Jonathan Dagher added on Facebook: “As our loved ones gasp for oxygen in COVID-19 wards, MPs cut the line today to take the vaccine.”

The health ministry did not immediately comment.

A surge in infections since January has brought Lebanon’s death toll over 4,300.

(Reporting by Ellen Francis and Laila Bassam; Additional reporting by Maha El Dahan; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)

New clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh; Pompeo says Turkey makes situation worse

By Nvard Hovhannisyan and Nailia Bagirova

YEREVAN/BAKU (Reuters) – Armenian and Azeri forces fought new clashes on Friday, defying hopes of ending nearly three weeks of fighting over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Turkey for inflaming the situation by arming the Azeris.

The worst outbreak of violence in the South Caucasus since Armenia and Azerbaijan went to war over the enclave in the 1990s, the fighting risks creating a humanitarian disaster, especially if it draws in Russia and Turkey.

Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but populated and governed by ethnic Armenians.

Turkey has increased military exports six fold this year to its close ally Azerbaijan. Russia, is close to both sides but has a defense pact with Armenia. News agency RIA reported the Russian navy had started planned military exercises in the Caspian Sea.

(Graphic: Ethnic tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh, https://graphics.reuters.com/ARMENIA-AZERBAIJAN/xklpyqoddpg/armenia-azerbaijan-2020_ethnic.jpg)

There were further signs on Friday that a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreed last Saturday to allow the sides to swap detainees and the bodies of those killed had all but broken down.

Armenia and Azerbaijan each accused the other of launching attacks, and each said it had the upper hand.

Armenian defense ministry official Artsrun Hovhannisyan said Azerbaijan had conducted artillery bombardments of Nagorno-Karabakh from the north, “with total disregard for the humanitarian truce”. He added that Azeri forces had been repelled and had suffered significant losses.

Azerbaijan’s defense ministry said Nagorno-Karabakh forces had been forced to retreat and Azeri forces retained the advantage along the line of contact that divides the sides.

Reuters could not independently verify the reports.

Baku also accused Yerevan of a missile attack on Ordubad in Nakhchivan autonomous province, a region which belongs to Azerbaijan but is surrounded by Armenia and Iran. Armenia denied such an attack.

The Nagorno-Karabakh defense ministry reported 29 more military casualties, bringing to 633 the number of servicemen killed since fighting broke out on Sept. 27. Azerbaijan does not disclose military casualties. The Azeri prosecutor-general’s office said 47 civilians had been killed and 222 wounded.

U.S. CRITICISM OF TURKEY

The hostilities, close to pipelines in Azerbaijan that carry gas and oil to global markets, are stoking concern in Europe and the United States that Turkey and Russia, already at loggerheads over Syria and Libya, will be dragged in.

Pompeo said Turkey had worsened the conflict by providing resources to Azerbaijan. A diplomatic resolution was needed, rather than “third-party countries coming in to lend their firepower to what is already a powder keg of a situation,” he said in an interview with broadcaster WSB Atlanta.

Ankara accuses Armenia of illegally occupying Azeri territory. Armenia says Turkey has encouraged Azerbaijan to pursue a military solution to the conflict, putting Armenian civilians in danger.

Armenia’s foreign ministry said Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan had spoken by phone with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, asking the international community to “neutralize” Azeri actions which he said posed “an existential danger of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh”.

Meanwhile Iran tweeted that its foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had offered the Azeri side Teheran’s help with the peace process.

ECONOMIC DAMAGE

The conflict between the two former Soviet republics threatens to further damage their economies, already hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and, in Azerbaijan’s case, weak oil prices.

With 43,280 COVID-19 cases, Azerbaijan said it would close secondary schools and shut the underground rail system in the capital Baku between Oct. 19 and Nov. 2.

Armenia said on Friday its caseload had risen to 61,460.

In projections drafted before fighting started, the World Bank predicted Armenia’s economy would shrink 6.3% this year, while expecting Azerbaijan to contract 4.2%.

(Additional reporting by Margarita Antidze in Tbilisi and Humeyra Pamuk in Washington; Writing by Sujata Rao; Editing by Timothy Heritage and Peter Graff)

More synchronized action needed to tackle COVID economic crisis, IMF’s Georgieva says

By Andrea Shalal and Marc Jones

WASHINGTON/LONDON (Reuters) – The international community must do more to tackle the economic fallout of the COVID-19 crisis, the head of the International Monetary Fund said on Monday, publicly calling on the World Bank to accelerate its lending to hard-hit African countries.

Some of the key events of the virtual and elongated annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank take place this week, with the most pressing issue how to support struggling countries.

“We are going to continue to push to do even more,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said during an online FT Africa summit.

“I would beg for also more grants for African countries. The World Bank has grant-giving capacity. Perhaps you can do even more… and bilateral donors can do more in that regard,” Georgieva said in an unusual public display of discord between the two major international financial institutions.

No immediate comment was available from the Bank.

Georgieva last week said the IMF had provided $26 billion in fast-track support to African states since the start of the crisis, but a dearth of private lending meant the region faced a financing gap of $345 billion through 2023.

The pandemic, a collapse in commodity prices and a plague of locusts have hit Africa particularly hard, putting 43 million more people at risk of extreme poverty, according to World Bank estimates. African states have reported more than 1 million coronavirus cases and some 23,000 deaths.

G20 governments are expected to extend for six months their Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) which has so far frozen around $5 billion of poorer countries’ debt payments, but pressure is on the main development banks and private creditors to provide relief too.

HOLDING ONTO GOLD RESERVES

Georgieva said the Fund was also pushing richer member countries to loan more of their existing Special Drawing Rights (SDR), the IMF’s currency, to countries that needed support most, and was “very committed” to finding a way forward for countries like Zambia now needing to restructure their debts.

The United States has blocked Georgieva’s early call for issuance of more SDRs, arguing that it would benefit mostly richer nations, not the developing countries that need it most.

Pledges to the Fund’s Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust, which supports low-income countries, have totaled $21 billion to date, including $14 billion in existing SDR holdings, but more resources were urgently needed, an IMF spokeswoman said.

The IMF chief dodged calls by civil society groups for the IMF to sell off some of its extensive gold reserves, saying the Fund viewed them as an important “financial buffer.”

Profit from selling less than 7% of the IMF’s gold could fund cancellation of all debt payments by the poorest countries to the IMF and World Bank for the next 15 months, the UK-based Jubilee Debt Campaign said in a new report issued Monday.

The IMF said its gold reserve of about 90.5 million ounces (2,814.1 metric tons) was worth about $137.8 billion at the end of December, compared to its historical cost of $4.4 billion.

Georgieva said countries in serious trouble must restructure their debts as soon as possible.

“This is the message for all countries in debt distress… If debt is not sustainable, please move towards restructuring, the sooner the better,” she said.

Georgieva said transparency in lending was critical for all parties, and welcomed what she called “encouraging” statements by China to move toward a more consolidated view of the debts held by the Chinese government and other institutions.

“I believe that now is the moment in this crisis, to make … transparency paramount and mandated to the extent possible everywhere,” she said.

(Reporting by Marc Jones in London, and Andrea Shalal and David Lawder in Washington; Editing by Tom Arnold, Ed Osmond and Andrea Ricci)

Coronavirus may push 150 million people into extreme poverty: World Bank

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The World Bank said on Wednesday that the coronavirus pandemic could push as many as 150 million people into extreme poverty by the end of 2021, wiping out more than three years of progress in poverty reduction.

Releasing its flagship biennial report on poverty and shared prosperity, the multilateral development lender said that an additional 88 million to 115 million people will fall into extreme poverty – defined as living on less than $1.90 a day -in 2020. The report said this could grow to 111 million to 150 million by the end of 2021.

That would mean that 9.1-9.4% of the world’s population would be living under extreme poverty this year, about the same as 2017’s 9.2% and representing the first rise in the extreme poverty percentage in about 20 years.

The 2019 extreme poverty rate was estimated at about 8.4% and had been expected to drop to 7.5% by 2021 before the coronavirus pandemic. The report said that without swift, substantial policy actions, a longstanding goal of cutting the rate to 3% by 2030 looked out of reach.

“The pandemic and global recession may cause over 1.4% of the world’s population to fall into extreme poverty,” World Bank President David Malpass said in a statement, calling it a “serious setback to development progress and poverty reduction.”

The report found that many of the new extreme poor are in countries that have high poverty rates already, but around 82% of these are in middle-income countries, where the poverty line is defined as income of $3.20 a day for low-middle-income countries and $5.50 a day for upper-middle-income countries.

While extreme poverty has been concentrated in rural areas in the past, the World Bank report found that increasing numbers of urban dwellers have been thrown into extreme poverty as jobs dry up from coronavirus lockdowns and reduced demand.

Sub Saharan Africa has the highest concentration of those living on less than $1.90 a day, and could see an increase of over 50 million people by 2021 compared to pre-coronavirus estimates. About 42% of the region’s population could be living under extreme poverty by 2021 versus a pre-COVID estimate of 37.8%, the study showed.

The coronavirus also has stagnated “shared prosperity,” defined as growing income for the poorest 40% of a country’s population. The World Bank said that from 2012 to 2017, income rose for this group by an average of 2.3% in 74 of 91 economies for which data was available.

The COVID-19 crisis could now reduce income for the poorest 40%, increasing income inequality and reducing social mobility, the bank said.

To get back on a track of poverty reduction, countries will need collective action to control the virus, provide support for households and build more resilient economies once the pandemic subsides, the World Bank said.

“Countries will need to prepare for a different economy post-COVID, by allowing capital, labor, skills and innovation to move into new businesses and sectors,” Malpass said.

(Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

World Bank approves record $500 million to battle locust swarms

By Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The World Bank on Thursday approved a record $500 million in grants and low-interest loans to help countries in Africa and the Middle East fight swarms of desert locusts that are eating their way across vast swaths of crops and rangelands.

Four of the hardest-hit countries – Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda – will receive $160 million immediately, Holger Kray, a senior World Bank official, told Reuters. He said Yemen, Somalia and other affected countries could tap funds as needed.

“The Horn of Africa finds itself at the epicenter of the worst locust outbreak we have seen in a generation, most probably in more than a generation,” he said, noting the new coronavirus pandemic is exacerbating the crisis.

Locust swarms have infested 23 countries across East Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, the biggest outbreak in 70 years, the World Bank said. It threatens food supplies in East Africa where nearly 23 million people are facing food shortages.

See graphic:

The World Bank estimates the Horn of Africa region could suffer up to $8.5 billion in damage to crop and livestock production by year-end without broad measures to reduce locust populations and prevent their spread. Even with the measures, losses could be as high as $2.5 billion, it said.

Desert locusts can travel up to 150 km (95 miles) a day, sometimes in swarms as large as 250 km (155.34 miles) across, eating their own body weight in greenery.

In Kenya, the locusts are eating in one day the amount of food consumed by all Kenyans in two days, Kray said.

The new World Bank program will help farmers, herders and rural households by providing fertilizer and seeds for new crops, and cash transfers to pay for food for people and livestock.

It will also fund investments to strengthen surveillance and early warning systems to make the region more resilient over the medium- to longer-term, Kray said.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Leslie Adler)