Yemen: Donated UN food aid for the most needy sold in markets to boost stallholders’ profits
A Sky News team inside Yemen has discovered shocking evidence that donated UN food aid meant for the most needy is instead being sold in street markets to help boost stallholders’ profits.
We found that donated cans of vegetable oil with World Food Programme (WFP) stamps on them were among the essential food items being sold in the province of Hodeidah. Alongside the WFP stamp, there were clear signs in English on the can saying “not for sale”.
In the same market stall in al Khokha, our investigations revealed sacks of flour and rice, also with large lettering saying “not for sale”, which appeared to have been donated by aid agencies from South Korea.
Warning: This article contains images some may find distressing
When we confronted the shopkeeper, he at first denied he was selling donated food aid. He then tried to hide the incriminating World Food Programme cereal packets that we had spotted on his counter.
This vegetable oil clearly says ‘not for sale’
Sacks of flour and rice, with large lettering saying ‘not for sale’, have also been found
When we continued to press him and drew attention to large supplies of the donated cereal at the back of his store, he admitted he knew he was not meant to be selling the donated goods.
He then insisted he would halt the practice that day – an assurance which few who heard him actually believed, given the large stock of donated aid he had in his small store.
But he insisted that he was certainly not the only stallholder selling food aid – and that he was fulfilling a “service” to desperate villagers.
“People come to me who have received the food aid but they need to sell it to me so they can buy medicine for their children. They sell it and I buy it in an emergency,” he attempted to explain.
This shopkeeper at first denied he was selling donated food aid
He later insisted he was certainly not the only stallholder selling food aid
Our investigation comes as the United Nations latest figures showed that children are the biggest victims in Yemen’s eight-year-old war.
According to UN figures, a child dies in Yemen every 10 minutes from preventable causes. That is a staggeringly high number of unnecessary deaths.
There are an estimated 11 million children who are identified as needing humanitarian aid in Yemen.
We are the first foreign journalist team inside Yemen since Iran and Saudi Arabia announced a dramatic breakthrough which has taken the country the closest it has got to possible peace in the eight years of conflict.
What we’ve discovered is both heartbreaking and shocking.
Ahad emaciated and weak
We saw a three-year-old little girl called Ahad being brought into a remote, basic clinic in al Khokha to try to get help.
Ahad is literally starving to death
Her ribs were protruding through her stretched skin. Her eyes were huge in the centre of a gaunt face and her limbs seemed massively elongated because of the lack of muscle or fat anywhere on her body.
She weighed just 3kg – at three years of age – that’s less than what an average newborn weighs fresh out of their mother’s womb.
Ahad couldn’t stand or sit because she was so emaciated and weak. She has Down’s syndrome too which is rarely seen here and the nurses who’re trying to care for her seem powerless to stop her slow inexorable decline. She is literally starving to death.
She’d only relatively recently been discharged from the small field hospital which operates here – just 10 days ago when she’d reached 4kg. In less than a fortnight, she’d dropped a kilo that she simply cannot afford to lose and which could cost her life.
Her father Saeed Saleh told us: “She just keeps bringing up the food we give her. She can’t seem to keep anything down.”
The tragedy for Yemen is that she is certainly not a rare case. At the same time as Ahad was being re-admitted, a six-month-old baby boy called Abdullah Mohammed Abdullah was crying in the arms of his 16-year-old mother.
As she rocked him backward and forward and tried to comfort her baby boy, the nurses noted she too looked malnourished.
She was certainly struggling to breastfeed. That could have explained why her little boy was a mass of skin and bone with the same huge starving eyes peering out from a skeletal face and body where the line of every rib can be clearly seen.
Read more:
Victims of forgotten war
There seems to be desperation and starvation everywhere. At the al Jasha camp for internally displaced people (IDP), there are nearly 9,000 people living in squalor. It is a place where only misery is guaranteed.
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What’s happening in Yemen?
Within seconds of us arriving, we were surrounded by angry people begging us for help and insisting in loud voices they were desperate and they were hungry.
“We don’t have anything to eat. Not even a little bit of rice. Nothing. We are suffocating, we are dying,” one man yells.
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Yemen: ‘We can never do enough’
The UN humanitarian chief recently warned that essential aid programmes were being closed down because of funding cuts and food rations had been reduced for eight million people in Yemen.
For a country in the grips of a humanitarian catastrophe it’s a bleak and terrifying future for millions.
Alex Crawford reports from Yemen with Middle East editor Zein Ja’far, cameraman Jake Britton and Yemen producer Ahmed Baider
This year will likely be the second or third warmest ever on record globally, as an “unprecedented streak” of high temperatures persists, UN scientists have warned.
It comes as climate talks between world leaders get under way in Brazil.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Prince William addressed other nations in the Amazonian city of Belem, including Brazil‘s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and officials from Jamaica, which is still reeling from the devastating Hurricane Melissa.
Global average surface temperatures in January to August 2025 were 1.42C above pre-industrial times, before humans started burning fossil fuels at scale, the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation has said.
The Amazon rainforest around COP30 is threatened by climate change and mining, which also raises cash for the state of Para. Pic: Reuters
The level is closing in on the target set in the landmark Paris Agreement, struck at COP21 in 2015, which aimed to limit global warming to “well below” 2C and ideally 1.5C.
That means just 10 years later, it is already looking “virtually impossible” to stick to the Paris goal without at least temporarily overshooting it, the WMO said.
Under this heat, the UK experienced its hottest summer on record, two million people in Pakistan were evacuated from deadly floods and parts of the Amazon rainforest are so dry that once rare wildfires now spread easily.
Hilde Heine, president of the coral atoll country of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, said the “widespread mortality of coral reefs [is] now seemingly inevitable” and the Amazon is “likely not far behind in suffering a similar fate”.
WMO chief Celeste Saulo stressed it would be “still entirely possible and essential” to bring temperatures down to the 1.5C goal again.
That 1.5C limit is “not just a figure” but a “lifeline for Pacific communities and climate-vulnerable nations” grappling with rising and warming seas, said Shiva Gounden, head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific.
“The legal, moral, and political responsibility for climate action has never been stronger, and the ambition leaders take to Belem will define its success.”
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A climate change protester. File pic: AP
Who’s staying away?
The leaders are in town over the course of two days, before the COP30 climate summit begins on Monday.
But only about 60 are due to attend, compared with more than double the number in some previous years.
The heads of the world’s three largest drivers of climate change, China, the US and India, are all staying at home.
Although many missing leaders will still send officials to the negotiations, diplomats here in Belem are worried that governments are distracted by cost-of-living woes and boosting defence.
They also fear US President Donald Trump will seek to water down any deals from afar by threatening countries that agree to anything too ambitious.
Leaders ‘denying reality’
Mariana Menezes, a Brazilian mother caught up in the devastating floods in Rio Grande do Sul last year, said: “We see world leaders denying reality and making plans to expand fossil fuels.
“These people, who once enjoyed full lives with unforgettable summers and long walks outdoors in their youth, are condemning future generations to lives of pollution and disasters.”
The WMO’s annual State of the Climate reports found that the past 11 years – from the Paris Agreement year of 2015 to 2025 – have each been in the top 11 warmest on record.
And the past three years have been the three warmest years in the record, stretching back 176 years.
In his speech, Sir Keir admitted that the “consensus is gone” on climate change – that cross-party unity on the science has splintered at home and globally.
He made an economic case for net zero, saying the green transition would create jobs and lower household bills.
But despite attacks on climate policies from the Conservatives and Reform, Britons are still concerned about and believe in climate change, and are still buying in to green technology like electric vehicles and heat pumps, Sky News has found.
US soldiers in Germany may not receive their November pay and have been given food bank advice as a government shutdown entered a record 37th day.
Around 37,000 US soldiers stationed in the country face uncertainty over November salary payments.
The Pentagon has warned US troops may not receive mid-month wages despite last-minute funding for October.
US treasury secretary Scott Bessent told CBS News: “I think we’ll be able to pay them beginning in November, but by 15 November our troops and service members who are willing to risk their lives aren’t going to be able to get paid.”
The US army also published guidance on its website directing soldiers in Germany to emergency social benefits, loans, and food sharing organisations including Tafel Deutschland – the umbrella organisation of more than 970 food banks in the country – as well as the app Too Good To Go.
Some of the information was later removed from the web page of the garrison in Bavaria, but some of the listings for services for those affected by the shutdown remained on a separate document.
Read more: What impact is the shutdown having?
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Cuts to flights
The US federal government shutdown became the longest in history on Wednesday – with Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, announcing he was ordering a 10% cut in flights at 40 major US airports from Friday.
Tens of thousands of flights have been delayed because of widespread air traffic control shortages, with the shutdown forcing 13,000 air traffic controllers and 50,000 Transportation Security Administration agents to work without pay.
Airlines have said at least 3.2 million travellers have already been impacted by air traffic control shortages.
Travellers waiting in long airport security lines in Houston on 3 November. Pic: AP
“Our job is to make sure we make the hard decisions to continue to keep the airspace safe,” said Mr Duffy.
“When we see pressures building in these 40 markets, we just can’t ignore it,” said Bryan Bedford, head of the Federal Aviation Administration.
“We can take action today to prevent things from deteriorating so the system is extremely safe today, will be extremely safe tomorrow.”
The government did not name the 40 sites affected, but the cuts are expected to hit the busiest airports, including those serving New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Dallas.
This would reduce as many as 1,800 flights and more than 268,000 airline seats, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
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Shutdown longest in history
The shutdown, which started on 1 October, has been triggered by politicians failing to pass new funding bills as a stand-off between the Democrats and Republicans over healthcare spending continues.
It has now eclipsed the 35-day federal closure in late 2018 and early 2019 during Donald Trump’s first term – disrupting the lives of millions of Americans as all non-essential parts of government are frozen.
Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate. But 60 votes are needed to pass any funding bill.
The Trump administration has sought to ramp up the pressure on Democrats to end the shutdown and has increasingly raised the spectre of dramatic aviation disruptions to force them to vote to reopen the government.
However, Democrats contend Republicans are to blame for refusing to negotiate over key health care subsidies.
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