NAIROBI, Sept 5 (ABC): The UN’s humanitarian chief warned on Monday that drought-ravaged Somalia was on the brink of famine and time was running out to save lives. “Famine is at the door and we are receiving a final warning,” Martin Griffiths, head of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told a press conference in Mogadishu. “We are in the last moment of the 11th hour to save lives,” he declared. An upcoming food and nutrition report on Somalia has concrete evidence that famine will strike two regions between October and December, Griffiths said.
“I’ve been shocked to my core these past few days at the level of pain and suffering we see so many Somalis enduring,” said Griffiths, who began a visit to the country on Thursday. Somalia and its neighbours in the Horn of Africa including Ethiopia and Kenya are in the grip of the worst drought in more than 40 years following four failed rainy seasons that have wiped out livestock and crops.
Humanitarian agencies have been ringing alarm bells for months. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) last month said the number of people at risk of starvation across the region had increased to 22 million. In Somalia alone, the number of people facing crisis hunger levels is 7.8 million, or about half the population, while around a million have fled their homes on a desperate quest for food and water, UN agencies say. In 2011, famine in parts of Somalia, one of the poorest countries on the planet, cost the lives of 260,000 people, more than half of them children under the age of six.
Griffiths described scenes of heart-rending suffering during his visit to Baidoa, one of the two areas at risk of famine, saying he saw “children so malnourished they could barely speak” or cry.