Tuesday, September 06, 2011
A sixth region, Bay in central Somalia, is in famine, according to data released following recent assessment missions. The studies show that more than half of the country, or four million people, need food aid to keep them from dying, but aid workers are concerned that the international fundraising effort is slowing.
Already "tens of thousands have died" and "hundreds" more are still dying each day, the UN's Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit said.
"In total, four million people are in crisis in Somalia, with 750,000 people at risk of death in the coming four months in the absence of adequate response," the report concluded.
Starvation in several more areas is expected to worsen in the coming months, before rains due in October water seeds ahead of harvests hoped for early next year.
"We can't underestimate the scale of the crisis," said Mark Bowden, the UN's humanitarian coordinator for Somalia.
"This is the most serious harvest failure in 17 years. And there is a continuing deterioration. Other areas in the country are falling into the critical category."
The crowded wards of Banadir hospital in central Mogadishu bear witness to the pain and suffering of famine victims.
Children, some silent, some whimpering in pain, were lying on plastic mattresses. Doctors struggled to insert an intravenous drip in one nearlifeless girl, who looked like she was less than six months old but who was well past her second birthday. Upstairs, Muslima Hassan Aden sat on the floor cradling her two-year-old daughter Shiqri, whose body was blotched with measles and whose eyes barely registered her mother's face. "She was such an active child, fit and always playing," Aden, 28, said. "But our crops failed after we saw no rain for three years. All of our animals have died.
"There was nothing where we came from. We had no choice but to run here."
Aden, her husband and their four children have lived near the central city of Baidoa, in Bay, all their lives.
She has never seen a drought like this one, she said, as Shiqri's eyes rolled closed for a moment. Aden's husband, Hassan Hussein Aden, 54, lives in a makeshift shelter near Mogadishu's airport after he spent three weeks on the road from Bay.
He said: "There was nothing left, no way to find food. In 40 years, I have never seen anything like this drought.
Aisha Bashir Aden, a 21-yearold medical student at the University of Mogadishu, is one of two "doctors" manning this ward. The other is a German aid worker.
On her second day on the job on Monday, she said she was overwhelmed by the dozen or more admissions waiting in the corridor.
"There are too many and they keep coming," she said.
More than 100,000 people have arrived in Somalia's seaside capital in recent months, driven from their rural homes by the hope of aid. The UN's World Food Program is handing out more than 100,000 hot meals a day.
Barry Came, the organization's representative, said there was hope more than 1.9 million people would soon regularly be given food, more than double the number being reached now. "This is probably the most difficult operation in the world," he said. "It is a conflict zone unlike other conflict zones, in that it is extremely difficult to get on the ground with assistance."
Doubling the number of people receiving food would require al-Shabaab, Somalia's Islamist insurgents, to allow the World Food Programme full access to their territory, Came said.