The United Nations has officially declared the food crisis in Somalia a famine, a classification used for the first time since a famine was formally declared in 1984 when conditions in Ethiopia and Somalia caused the deaths of more than a million people. The U.N. commissioner for refugees, Antonio Guterres, said drought-ridden Somalia is currently the “worst humanitarian disaster” in the world.
According to a Huffington Post article posted today, “The United Nations has officially declared the food crisis in parts of Somalia a “famine” and reiterated its desperate call for more aid from donor countries. “If we don’t act now, famine will spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months, due to poor harvests and infectious disease outbreaks,” said Mark Bowden, the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, in a statement. ‘We still do not have all the resources for food, clean water, shelter, and health services to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Somalis in desperate need.’
Despite the fact that it is commonly used to refer to widespread hunger situations, famine is actually a carefully used term of art in the humanitarian world, indicating that hunger-related deaths have reached 2 per 10,000 per day and acute malnutrition rates are at 30%. The UN said today that in some of the most-affected parts of Somalia the acute malnutrition rate has reached fifty percent, and 5 children per 10,000 die every day from lack of food…There are currently more than 11 million people in need of food aid in the Horn of Africa, where the most severe drought in half a century occurred this spring, nearly wiping out crops that were already depleted.”
Over half of Somalia’s 3.7 million people are in need of food aid, but the country has lacked an effective government since before the famine of the early 1990s. Most of southern Somalia is controlled by the al-Shabab Islamist group, which has prevented most international aid organizations from operating in its areas for the past two years, only lifting the ban last week. This week, however, al-Shabab re-enacted the ban, calling the United Nations declaration of a famine in two areas under its control “propaganda.”
