NAIROBI — The
UN warned
Monday that
Somalia was on the brink of famine for the second time in just over
a decade, and that time was running out to save lives in the drought-ravaged
country.
اضافة اعلان
“Famine is at
the door and we are receiving a final warning,” UN humanitarian chief Martin
Griffiths told a press conference in the Somali capital Mogadishu.
“The
unprecedented failure of four consecutive rainy seasons, decades of conflict,
mass displacement, severe economic issues are pushing many people to ... the
brink of famine.”
Millions of
people are at risk of starvation in Somalia and its neighbors in the Horn of
Africa including
Ethiopia and Kenya which are in the grip of the worst drought
in four decades after four failed rainy seasons wiped out livestock and crops.
A food and
nutrition report has “concrete indications” that famine will strike Baidoa and
Burhakaba in the Bay region of south-central Somalia between October and
December, said the head of the
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), who began a visit to the country on Thursday.
“I’ve been
shocked to my core these past few days by the level of pain and suffering we
see so many Somalis enduring,” he added.
“We are in the
last moment of the 11th hour to save lives.”
Humanitarian
agencies have been ringing alarm bells for months and say the situation in the
Horn of Africa is likely to deteriorate with a likely fifth failed rainy season
in the offing.
‘Worst fears now a reality’
Griffiths said the situation was worse than during Somalia’s last
famine in 2011 when 260,000 people died, more than half of them children under
the age of six.
The
UN’s World Food Program (WFP) last month said the number of people at risk of starvation
across the Horn had increased to 22 million.
“Our worst fears
for Somalia are now a reality: Famine is imminent if funds do not arrive
immediately,” WFP Executive Director David Beasley said on Twitter.
“The world MUST
act now — this is a global call to action.”
In Somalia alone,
the number of people facing crisis hunger levels is 7.8 million, or about half
the population, while around a million have fled their homes on a desperate
quest for food and water, UN agencies say.
Griffiths
described scenes of heart-rending suffering during a visit to Baidoa,
describing it as the epicenter of the crisis where he saw “children so
malnourished they could barely speak” or cry.
He said 1.5
million children across the country were at risk of acute malnutrition by
October if nothing changed.
Conflict-wracked
Somalia is considered one of the most vulnerable to climate change but is
particularly ill-equipped to cope with the crisis.
A deadly
insurgency by the terrorist Al-Shabaab group for more than a decade and a half
against the fragile federal government is limiting humanitarian access to many
areas.
A long-running
political crisis also diverted attention away from the drought, but new
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud used his inauguration speech in June to appeal
for international help to stave off disaster.
In recent years,
increasingly extreme droughts and floods have added to the devastation caused
by a locust invasion and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The UN’s World
Meteorological Organization has said the Horn was likely facing a fifth
straight failed rainy season over the months of October to December.
‘Sleepwalking’ to catastrophe
At the start of this year, the WFP had put the number of people facing
hunger across the horn at 13 million, and appealed for donors to open their
wallets.
Funds were
initially slow in coming, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine among other crises
drawing attention from the disaster in the Horn, humanitarian workers said.
The war in
Ukraine has also sent global food and fuel prices soaring, making aid delivery
more expensive.
In June, British
charity
Save the Children had issued an alert that the international community
was “sleepwalking towards another catastrophic famine” in Somalia.
OCHA has said
the March-May 2022 rainy season was the driest on record in the last 70 years,
and 2020–2022 had surpassed “the horrific droughts in both 2010–2011 and
2016–2017 in duration and severity”.
“An estimated
2.3 million girls and boys are at imminent risk of violence, exploitation,
abuse, neglect, and death from severe acute malnutrition as result of food and
nutrition crisis across Somalia,” it said in August.
In 2017, more
than 6 million people in Somalia, more than half of them children, needed aid
because of a prolonged drought across East Africa.
But early
humanitarian action averted famine that year.
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