UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 17 (Xinhua) -- UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock on Thursday asked the Security Council and UN member states to take immediate action to tackle food insecurity and to boost humanitarian aid.

The COVID-19 pandemic is dramatically increasing wider humanitarian need, he told the Security Council in a briefing on conflict-induced hunger.

"Things are going to get worse. I don't think we have seen the peak of the pandemic yet. But the indirect impact is already deepening poverty, destroying livelihoods, undermining education, disrupting immunization, and exacerbating food insecurity, fragility and violence," he said.

The humanitarian agencies are in danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the needs, and that will get worse in the absence of a lot more financial help, he said. So there are concrete measures the Security Council and UN member states more widely can take: first, press for peaceful and negotiated political solutions to bring armed conflicts to an end; second, ensure the parties to conflict respect international humanitarian law; third, mitigate the economic impact of armed conflict and related violence, including by mobilizing international financial institutions.

Most important of all, he said, is to scale up support for humanitarian operations and take bigger and more ambitious steps to support the economies of countries facing severe, large-scale hunger.

Lowcock voiced particular concern about food insecurity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), northeast Nigeria and the Sahel region.

In the DRC, nearly 22 million people are acutely food insecure, the highest number in the world, as a result of COVID-19 compounding the impact of decades of conflict. In northeast Nigeria, violence by extremist non-state armed groups is largely responsible for driving up humanitarian needs. In the Sahel, an upsurge in violence and armed group attacks has forcibly displaced more than 1 million people, most of whom are dependent on agriculture. In total, some 14 million people are experiencing crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity, the highest figures for a decade, he said.