SOMALIA IS facing a worsening food crisis, aid groups said yesterday, as malnutrition rates and food prices continue to rise due to the “worst drought in years”.
One in four children are now suffering from acute malnutrition in the southern parts of the country, with 57,000 severely so, said the group of agencies, which includes Concern and Trócaire.
About 2.4 million Somalis, almost a third of the country’s population, are currently living in crisis, with malnutrition affecting 30 per cent of the population – one of the highest rates in the world and double the threshold of an emergency.
“It’s a very serious situation,” said Geno Teofilo of Oxfam Somalia. “This is the worst that the country has seen in years. It is so bad that in some communities even the camels are dying.”
Although East Africa is prone to recurrent droughts, this year’s has been unusually severe because of the La Niña phenomenon, which pulls away moisture from the Indian Ocean and dumps water on southeast Asia and Australia.
According to the World Meteorological Society, this is the worst such event in a century, with two-thirds of Somalia receiving less than 75 per cent of normal rainfall during the three-month rainy season that runs until December, according to the UN-funded Somalia Water and Land Information Management programme.
Cereal prices are up by at least 20 per cent from this time last year, with the Bay region in the south registering the sharpest climb at 135 per cent.
Water prices have soared and the number of livestock deaths is on the rise as their pasture has been destroyed, says the Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit – Somalia, which analyses Somali food, nutrition and livelihood security.
This has in turn led to a deterioration in the war-torn country’s refugee crisis.
Over 55,000 people have been displaced by the recent drought and many others are migrating to urban areas in search of food and water.
The majority of these are destined for refugee camps in Kenya, said aid agencies, where over 300,000 people already live in overcrowded camps. The group of agencies has called on donors to increase aid to Somalia, as only 36 per cent of the $529 million expected in funding for 2011 has so far been received.
However, the international community is reluctant to intervene because of the precarious security situation in the country.
Somalia has been without a functioning government since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted in 1991, opening a vacuum for the Islamist group al-Shabaab, which has been locked in fighting with the internationally backed Transitional Federal Government for several years.
The Afgoye Corridor, 30km outside Mogadishu, is home to the largest concentration of displaced people in the world.
However, many of them are not receiving aid because the area is controlled by al-Shabaab. Almost 50 humanitarian workers were killed in Somalia during 2008 and 2009. In the most recent clashes, at least 13 people were killed.
There are currently 1.46 million internally displaced people in Somalia, as well as over 650,000 Somali refugees in neighbouring countries.