The UN continues to sound the alarm on the food insecurity in Somalia following an unprecedented severe drought.
“Things are bad and everything indicates that they will get worse,” James Elder, a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned Tuesday at a press conference in Geneva, adding that “without more action and investment, we face children. deaths on a scale that hasn’t been seen for half a century ”.
This official informed that in this East African country, “every minute of every day, a child is admitted to a health facility to be treated for severe acute malnutrition,” while acknowledging that these statistics may be underestimated as only children who manage to reach one, the treatment centers are counted.
For James Elder, with such rates, Somalia is on the verge of a tragedy of a scale not seen in decades. He said the current situation looks worse than it experienced in 2011, when famine killed more than 260,000 people.
“In 2011, after three failed rains, the affected population was half of the current one and the general conditions – rains and crops – were on the mend. Today: four missed rains; the forecast for the fifth rain looks rather bleak and the affected population is double that of 2011, ”Elder said.
UNICEF says it has deployed, in response to this worrying humanitarian crisis, mobile teams to “find and treat” malnourished children even in hard-to-reach places and that more than 300,000 children have been treated for severe acute malnutrition this year. .
Funding remains a great challenge for the UN body, given that donors’ promises are not always fully kept.
The humanitarian team in Somalia has revised upward the response plan for this year which now stands at $ 2.26 billion, up from $ 1.46 billion previously, a 55% increase.
