News Release: Food insecurity and malnutrition are worsening across Somalia. The risk of famine is increasing amid a historic fourth failed rainy season.
This means that UNICEF will require an estimated additional million more than expected for the Horn of Africa alone, Ms. Dagash explained.
Worse than 2011 famine
Some 213,000 people are in IPC 5 – “Catastrophe” level – a 160 per cent increase in the number of people facing extreme lack of food, facing starvation death and destitution, since the last IPC report in mid-April.
In addition to calling on the international community to provide more funding for emergency assistance, UN humanitarians have stressed that what is also needed is investment in resilience-building measures, to save people’s livelihoods and prevent them from having to leave their homes, in search of food, water and healthcare.
UN agencies are calling on the international community to act fast to avoid catastrophe: https://t.co/eIghGaunRF pic.twitter.com/ZHy8lMr1qX
The latest analysis from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) platform shows that 7.1 million people, or 45 per cent of the country, are in IPC Phase 3 or “Crisis” or worse food security outcomes. Families in the most affected areas do not have enough to eat and are using crisis-coping strategies to stave off hunger.
Kids most vulnerable
The FAO representative noted that support required for 2022 for this lifesaving and livelihood safeguarding work “has not yet fully materialized, and hundreds of thousands of Somalis are at a very real risk of starvation and death”.
The likely outcome is yet more crop failures and the deaths of yet more livestock as water sources dry up.
As a direct result of rainy season failures and the Ukraine war’s impact on global supply chains, the cost of life-saving therapeutic food that UNICEF uses to treat children with severe acute malnutrition, is projected to rise by 16 per cent globally over the next six months.
Millions of animal deaths
The UN and its partners are also channelling limited resources into famine prevention projects.
Out of this 7.1 million, around 2.1 million people are in IPC 4 or “Emergency” level, which is signified by very high acute malnutrition and rising levels of death among children and adults.
To help communities resist ever more frequent droughts caused by climate change, UN teams and partners have had to dig even deeper wells than before, in some cases down to two kilometres.
Some three million livestock have died since mid-2021, from drought and disease, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Latest weather forecasts offer no reassurance either, as they suggest that the next October to December rains are likely to fail, too.
“We’re assisting rural families to stay where they are by providing lifesaving cash transfers to purchase essentials such as food, water and medicine, as well as livelihood items,” said Etienne Peterschmitt, FAO Representative in Somalia.
Real risk of starvation
According to UNICEF, between February and May this year, the number of households without reliable access to clean and safe water almost doubled, from 5.6 million to 10.5 million.
The number of children facing severe acute malnutrition has increased by more than 15 per cent in the space of five months, the UNICEF officer explained via video link from Nairobi, adding that across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, more than 1.7 million children are in urgent need of treatment.
To illustrate continuing deep concern about emergency levels of malnutrition in Somalia and the wider Horn of Africa, UN Children’s Fund UNICEF reported meeting parents who had to bury their emaciated children by the roadside, as they trekked hundreds of kilometres to seek medical help.
Rania Dagash, UNICEF Deputy Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa, (left) meets with a mother and her twins, who are suffering from malnutrition, at a health centre in Dollow, Somalia.
