The United Nations warned that the famine in East Africa hasn’t peaked yet and hundreds of thousands of people face imminent starvation and death without a massive global response.
UN deputy emergency relief coordinator Catherine Bragg has appealed to the international community for $1.3 billion, which is needed urgently to save lives.
Hundreds of thousands face imminent starvation and death. We can act to prevent further loss of life and ensure the survival of those who are on the brink of death.”
Bragg’s office, which coordinates UN humanitarian efforts, said the famine is expected to spread to all regions of south Somalia in the next four to six weeks unless further aid can be delivered. The global body says it has received $1.1 billion, just 46% of the $2.4 billion requested from donor countries.
Bragg’s appeal came as a UN food agency official warned that the number of people fleeing famine-hit areas of Somalia is likely to rise dramatically and could overwhelm international aid efforts in the Horn of Africa.
Luca Alinovi, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s representative in Kenya, warned that the situation could become “simply unbearable” in the coming weeks if Somalis continue to abandon their homes in southern and central parts of the country – which are mainly under control of al-Shabab Islamist extremists – in search of food.
The United Nations estimates over 11 million people across East Africa need food aid because of a long-running drought exacerbated by al-Shabab’s refusal to allow many humanitarian organisations to deliver aid in areas it controls, including the UN World Food Programme, the world’s major aid provider.
According to the UN‘s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit, Bragg said, “the current situation represents the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world today and Africa’s worst food security crisis since Somalia’s 1991-92 famine.”
The Food and Agriculture Organisation reported that cereal prices in East Africa reached new peaks in several countries last month, worsening the already dramatic situation for millions of hungry people. The FAO said prices of milk also were at record or very high levels in most of the region.
Food prices were driven higher by drought-plagued harvests and sharp increases in fuel and transport costs, according to the Rome-based agency.
In the past two months some 220,000 people have fled toward the Somali capital of Mogadishu and across the borders to Kenya and Ethiopia, where refugee camps are straining under the pressure of new arrivals. Almost one million people are displaced elsewhere in Somalia, the UN estimates.
Cash payments have been controversial in Somalia, because of the possibility that money might end up in the hands of militant groups like al-Shabab, who are fighting the weak central government in Mogadishu.
In recent weeks some progress was made to scale up emergency operations by the International Committee of the Red Cross in central and southern Somalia. It is the only organisation allowed to conduct food distribution in al-Shabab areas.
The UN children’s agency, UNICEF, is also boosting its supplies for feeding centres, she said. But still, 3.7 million Somalis “are in crisis,” 2.8 million of them in south central Somalia, and 3.2 million need “immediate, lifesaving assistance” including 1.25 million children. This is a crisis, and it is real. Women and children are starving. We are so caught up in our own greed, our ‘problems’, that we cannot look south and see the human tragedy which is unfolding day after day. We moan about having to work longer and harder and children drop like flies. What does that make us?