Somalia’s transitional president on Thursday appealed for $60-million in urgent aid for about two million southern Somalis facing severe food and water shortages amid an increasing threat of famine across large swaths of the drought-stricken Horn of Africa.
In a statement released as drought and pre-famine conditions have triggered dire warnings that many more millions are at risk of starvation in neighbouring Kenya and Ethiopia, President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed urged donors not to forget about Somalis in need.
”There is a humanitarian emergency throughout southern Somalia,” he said, describing the situation as ”volatile” among the mainly nomadic pastoralist population in the area.
”All the livestock and an estimated two million people face that danger.”
Yusuf’s statement was issued from the provincial town of Jowhar north of the capital where he and a part of Somalia’s badly fractured transitional administration are based amid a deepening dispute over the seat of government with Mogadishu warlords.
In the Kenyan capital, a Somali government official said the appeal was for cash and ”food, medicine, water and other essential goods” that are in short-supply in southern Somalia, which has been beset by chronic food insecurity due to poor rains, crop failures and insecurity.
On Wednesday, the United States government’s Famine Early Warning System Network (Fews) issued emergency alerts for southern Somalia, Ethiopia’s southern Somali region and Kenya’s northeast, all of which have been badly affected by drought.
”The lives and livelihoods of the population in these regions will be at risk over the coming months,” it said of southern Somalia. ”Increased humanitarian interventions are urgently required.”
”The situation is equally bad in northeastern Kenya and parts of Ethiopia bordering southern Somalia,” Fews said.
In northeastern Kenya, where at least 20 people have died from hunger and related illnesses this month and the at-risk population is expected to rise from 1,3-million to 2,5-million by February, it said additional aid was urgently needed.
”Projected increases in beneficiary numbers combined with limited donor pledges and a food-aid pipeline that is expected to be exhausted in February 2006 require immediate action … to avoid the loss of lives and livelihood assets,” it said.
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, who visited the worst-hit areas this week, has already appealed for $100-million (€84-million) in emergency relief for victims of what the local media has dubbed the ”Christmas famine.”
In Ethiopia’s southern Somali region, Fews said about one million pastoralists and their livestock were facing ”pre-famine conditions” and that immediate assistance was needed to prevent the situation from deteriorating.
”Urgent responses [are] required to prevent an alarming escalation of food insecurity crisis” in the Somali region, it said.
While conditions are roughly similiar in all three nations, Somalia poses extraordinary challenges for relief workers as lawlessness and insecurity are rampant in the country which has had no functioning central government for the past 14 years.
A surge in piracy off the Somali coast this year — in which two UN-chartered food aid vessels have been hijacked — has severely affected the flow of relief supplies to the nation that the United Nations says is suffering from a largely forgotten ”continuing humanitarian crisis”.
Earlier this month, the United Nations launched an appeal for $174-million (€145-million) in assistance for the country noting that donors had thus far this year contributed only about half of the $162-million (€136-million) needed for 2005. – AFP
