The United Nations food agency on Saturday warned of an impending catastrophe if donors delay funding humanitarian programmes to feed at least 3,5-million Kenyans threatened by a prolonged drought.
The agency has enough cereals to last until April, but will run out of the less important vegetable oil and pulses by month’s end, World Food Programme (WFP) spokesperson Peter Smerdon said.
”If we don’t get any more food aid it will be a catastrophe … We are already on the edge because food is running out and we are supposed to be feeding people until February next year,” Smerdon said.
”If we get a break in the food pipeline then malnutrition will go up very seriously,” he explained.
WFP chief James Morris is expected later on Saturday in El Wak, a dusty outpost about 820km northeast of Nairobi on the Somali border, which is seen as illustrative of the effects of prolonged drought in the Horn of Africa, where at least 11-million people are threatened by starvation. Smerdon explained that the agency has a shortfall in funding of $197-million in its food aid programme for Kenya, a nation of about 32-million people.
Of the $225-million needed until February 2007 to buy about 396 525 tonnes of food each month, the agency has received $28-million, according to the WFP.
El Wak resident Mohamed Ibrahim (55) said the current drought has reduced his camels from 200 to 40 and cattle from 100 heads to three.
”We don’t just need food, we need other kinds of help as well,” said Ibrahim. ”People say we should change the way we live but there are no towns, no businesses, no agriculture that we can do. And so we use our animals as banks.”
”The situation is getting worse because we are seeing an increase in the numbers of children coming to us,” said Ibrahim Younis, emergency coordinator of a feeding centre in El Wak run by the aid agency, MSF-Beligum.
”The key problem is water because these children are malnourished and a lack of hygiene means they get diarrhoea, which pushes them over the edge,” Younis explained.
In addition to Kenya, the UN estimates that up to 11-million people in three other east African countries — Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti — are on the brink of starvation. – Sapa-AFP