LONDON: Four million Syrians will be in need of urgent food aid, UN agencies have warned, as crop and livestock production has been devastated by the civil war.

The most vulnerable include the internally displaced, small-scale farmers, herders, casual traders, the urban poor, pregnant mothers, the disabled and chronically sick.

If the present conflict continues, the food security prospects for 2014 could be worse than they are now, said a joint report from the World Food Programme and Food and Agriculture Organisation. “With so many adverse factors now stacked against the crop and livestock sectors, and assuming that the present crisis remains unresolved, domestic production over the next 12 months will be severely compromised,” the report said.

The world’s worst humanitarian disaster has left 93,000 people dead, displaced 4.25m people internally and forced more than 1.6m to leave the country to seek refuge in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. The number of people in need is expected to rise to 10m, nearly half of the population, by the end of the 2013.

By arrangement with the Guardian