Yes, I was just on the ground in Yemen for several days in Aden, Sana'a and Hudaydah. If you can imagine the dangers of going to Hudaydah, everybody, UN security, said, “You can't go to Hudaydah.” I said that I have to go to Hudaydah. I said that I have to stand in that port and I have to let the world see that we have to protect this port at all costs because if this port shuts down, we will have an unprecedented catastrophe. People have been saying that Yemen is on the verge of catastrophe and I have said that is totally untrue—it is a catastrophe. Every 10 to 11 minutes a child is dying now. We were assisting about eight million people as of a few weeks ago on any given day. Those were severely hungry people who literally were marching toward the brink of starvation.
Today, based on our new numbers, the severe hunger rate has jumped to between 15 million and 16 million people. Now the question you have to ask is what is driving the substantial increase, because the war has been there for several years. This is a country that was already very impoverished, the stunting rate was already one of the highest in the world. The rial had already been depreciated since 20 years ago from 70:1 to 215:1 the day before the war started, approximately. When I was there a few weeks ago it was 720:1. So you can imagine the purchasing power, assuming there is anything to buy, coupled with the fact that you have no money because there are no jobs. Eight million livelihoods have been destroyed since the war began and 1.2 million civil servants have received almost no pay in the past three years. There is no liquidity in the marketplace.
When you look at the last three months, the hunger rate has spiked 3.6 million in the last three months and 1.6 million in the last 30 days. It's the same war. Nothing has really changed, so what's happening now? There is no liquidity anymore. There is no money, and nobody in the outside world wants to give credit anymore. It is a perfect storm.
We've been able to avert famine in spite of the fights that we've had. A year ago we were fighting. I was hard on the Saudis. They had the blockade, and weren't providing money for the humanitarian consequence, so I went after them pretty hard internationally. The Houthis were so excited, “We're so glad you're jumping on the Saudis.” I said, “Let me tell you something. I am not taking sides. This is about human rights, human dignity, and when you cross that line, I will be on your back too. It's just a matter of when, if you do it.”
Three weeks ago I met with the Houthis and I was blistering them pretty hard because of lack of access. We eliminated or resolved the blockade issue with the Saudis. They stepped up with funding. The U.A.E., by the way, has been quite remarkable to work with in the last year. There has been an amazing change. They actually call us and ask, “What can we do? Is there anything we are not doing right that we can do better?” That's other than the issue of the war itself, of course. That's the driving dynamic here. The Houthis, who control the access that we need in most of these areas where most of the people are, have been a problem in terms of access, lack of visas that we need for the number of people and the types of people we need, coupled with the equipment that we need. When you're feeding eight million people on any given day, it takes a lot of movement of stuff.
Now I can honestly say, and I've met with the Houthi leadership—the Houthis are not a simple dynamic; there are different Houthi leaders—and some of them have made a positive step forward in the last few weeks. I explained to them that I planned to tell the people in the world that people are going to be dying because they're not giving us the access and I need for them to work with us, and many have. On the other hand, there are some Houthis who don't care. They don't care at all.