By Olivia Le Poidevin
GENEVA, May 8 (Reuters) – Somalia faces a severe malnutrition crisis and urgently needs more aid funding to avert a catastrophe, the United Nations World Food Programme said on Friday, warning it may be forced to halt humanitarian support from July without additional financing.
A combination of multiple failed rain seasons, which have wiped out crops and livestock, and ongoing conflict and insecurity is pushing people in Somalia into dangerous levels of hunger at a time of radical cuts in foreign aid and aid shortages sparked by the war on Iran, the WFP said.
Some 6 million people in Somalia, or almost one in three, are facing acute hunger, while 1.9 million children are acutely malnourished, according to the WFP.
“Somalia faces a really severe malnutrition crisis and is one of the biggest malnutrition hotspots in the world,” Matthew Hollingworth, WFP assistant executive director for programme operations, told reporters in Geneva. He spoke via video link from Rome.
Somalia faces several overlapping conflicts, including a long-running Islamist insurgency by the Al-Shabaab militant group against the federal government as well as political disputes between Mogadishu and regional states over power and security.
The situation in the country bears similar warning signs to 2022, when Somalia was on the brink of famine following a prolonged drought, but the difference this time is that aid agencies do not have the funding to respond at a massive scale, the WFP said.
The agency, which manages 90% of the food security response to Somalia, has had to reduce the number of people it can reach to 500,000 from 2 million, and could have to halt its services altogether by July due to funding cuts, Hollingworth added.
The WFP and the wider humanitarian sector also face widespread shortages of life-saving aid, with Ready-to-use-Therapeutic-Food facing delays of up to 40 days, due to supply chain disruption sparked by the war in the Middle East, Hollingworth said.
(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin Editing by Ludwig Burger and Miranda Murray)
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