Tuesday January 17, 2017
The UN has warned that millions of people in Somalia are at risk of famine after poor rains were forecast for the Horn of African nation that is struggling to recover from last year’s drought — the worst for three decades in some areas.
Diplomats said the situation was expected to deteriorate because donors were unlikely to contribute the $864m the UN appealed for on Tuesday to alleviate the crisis.
The lack of a fully functioning government in the country where al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist group, has been waging an armed insurrection for years is further exacerbating the situation.
“The levels of human suffering in Somalia, triggered by protracted conflict, seasonal shocks and disease outbreaks are typically hard to bear, but the impact of this drought represents a threat of a different scale and magnitude,” said Peter de Clercq, the UN’s humanitarian co-ordinator for Somalia. “We are faced with . . . a significant risk of further deterioration to famine.”
Mr de Clercq said 5m of the 12.3m population were in need of assistance and that many of the indicators that preceded a 2011 famine, in which 260,000 people died, had reappeared and were deteriorating faster than previously expected.
The UN said 2016 was the driest year in the Bari region, in north-east Somalia, since 1985, and in other areas it was the driest year this century.
As a consequence nomadic pastoralists have begun moving to Mogadishu, the capital, and other towns, Mr de Clercq said.