SOMALIA’S “dire hunger emergency” has escalated to frightening levels, with one-third of the population expected to face crisis or worse levels of food needs, World Food Programme executive director Cindy McCain said on Thursday.
Her statement came as the United Nations agency has been forced to cut food aid drastically for lack of funding.
Cindy McCain told the UN security council that the latest food security data shows over 6.6 million Somalis in desperate need of assistance, including 40,000 “fighting for survival in famine-like conditions.”
But she said that the World Food Programme had been forced to cut monthly food assistance, which had reached a record 4.7 million people in December, to just 3m people at the end of April.
She added: “Without an immediate cash injection, we’ll have to cut our distribution lists again in July to just 1.8m per month.”
Ms McCain, who visited Somalia last month, said that she had seen “how conflict and climate change are conspiring to destroy the lives and livelihoods of millions of Somalis.”
The country’s longest drought on record, which killed millions of livestock and decimated crops, recently gave way to disastrous flash floods in the south, she added.
Urging donors to be as generous as they were in hauling Somalia “back from the abyss of famine in 2022,” Mr McCain warned that the survival of millions of Somalis is at stake.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres visited Somalia in April “to ring the alarm” and appealed for “massive international support” for the Horn of Africa country.
However, the results of a high-level donors’ conference for three countries in the region — Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya — on May 24 were very disappointing.
It raised less than $1 billion (£786m) of the more than $5bn (£3.9bn) that organisers were hoping for to help over 30m people.
Only in the past few years has Somalia begun to find its footing after three decades of violent chaos caused by warlords, the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group and the emergence of Islamic State-linked jihadists.
With Somalia having faced numerous attacks from al-Shabab, the government recently embarked on what has been described as the most significant offensive against the extremist group in more than a decade.
Catriona Laing, the new UN special representative for Somalia, told the council that the government’s operations have degraded al-Shabab militarily and dislodged its fighters from a number of areas, which is “a notable achievement.”
Nonetheless, she warned that the group remains a “significant threat” in the region.
