Fatuma Hassan Yarow, above at left, a 12-year-old Somali girl, rested after arriving in Dadaab, Kenya, home to tens of thousands of refugees. |
By Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Times, September 5, 2011
NAIROBI, Kenya —
The United Nations announced Monday that Somalia’s famine had spread to a sixth area
within the country, with officials warning that 750,000 people could die in the
next few months unless aid efforts were scaled up.
Somalis
lined up for food at a camp for the displaced south of Mogadishu.
A combination of drought, war, restrictions on aid groups and years of
chaos have pushed four million Somalis — more than half the population — into
“crisis,” according to the United Nations. Agricultural production is just a
quarter of what it normally is, and food prices continue to soar.
“We can’t underestimate the scale of the crisis,” said Mark Bowden,
the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Somalia. “Southern Somalia is
the epicenter of the famine area in the Horn of Africa. It’s the source of most
of the refugees, and we need to refocus our efforts.”
In July, the United Nations declared that parts of southern Somalia
had met the technical criteria of famine as defined by certain thresholds of
death and malnutrition rates. Since then, the famine has slowly spread,
covering a large chunk of the southern third of Somalia, including parts of the
capital, Mogadishu, and several farming areas, which means food production has
been crippled.
On Monday, the United Nations added the entire Bay region, where
nearly 60 percent of children are acutely malnourished, to the list of
famine-stricken areas. When pushed for numbers on how many people have died
across Somalia so far, Mr. Bowden said: “We can’t give an exact figure, but we
can say tens of thousands of people have died over the last three to four
months, over half of whom are children. That translates into hundreds a day.”
Somalia has lurched from crisis to crisis since its central government
collapsed in 1991. There have been more than a dozen attempts to restore a
functioning central government, and the United Nations is currently holding a
conference in Mogadishu to bring political leaders together to discuss future
plans.
But much of southern Somalia is still ruled by the Shabab, an Islamist militant group, which has
forced out many large aid organizations and has even prevented starving people from fleeing drought areas.
Though the International Committee of the Red Cross and several Muslim
charities are bringing food aid to Shabab-controlled areas, residents
there complain that gunmen steal much of the food. Similar complaints have been lodged in the
government-controlled areas of Mogadishu.
Another rising concern is disease. Measles, cholera, malaria and
typhoid have already begun to sweep through displaced
persons’ camps, where sick and starving people have congregated in the hopes of
getting aid. Aid officials predict that the drought, which has hit Kenya and
Ethiopia as well, will end in October, but the ensuing rains could raise the
risk of waterborne and infectious diseases.
“A massive, multisectoral response is critical to prevent additional
deaths and total livelihood/social collapse,” said a statement on Monday by the
Famine Early Warning Systems Network and the
Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit, which are financed by the American
government and the United Nations. “Assuming current levels of response
continue, famine is expected to spread further over the coming four months.”
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