The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) called for a donation of $19,5-million on Tuesday to safeguard war-weary Somalis from an expected crop failure.
The UN’s Food Security Analysis Unit warned last month that the southern and central parts of the Horn of Africa country could face a crop failure due to poor rainfall, and with ongoing violence in the capital, Mogadishu, WFP warned an increase in food aid is critical.
”The people of Somalia have been hit by drought and floods last year and now insecurity and new displacements. They need humanitarian assistance to survive,” said Peter Goossens, WFP’s Somalia country director.
The UN’s food agency said the $19,5-million would feed one million people by the end of the year.
WFP and the International Maritime Organisation called this month for concerted action against increasing piracy off Somalia’s shores, which is hindering the delivery of food aid to Somalis.
Meanwhile, attacks continued to plague the volatile capital on Tuesday, with local reports saying several people had been killed in Mogadishu’s central Bakara market in two days of bloodletting.
The violence came ahead of the resumption on Thursday of a European Union-backed reconciliation conference seen as the last best hope to bring peace to the anarchic country.
Suicide bombings, mortar shelling and assassination attempts have for the past six months convulsed Mogadishu, which has not known peace since the 1991 overthrow of dictator Mohammed Siad Barre by warlords who then turned on each other.
The transitional government — the 14th attempt at cementing effective central rule in the country — blames the violence on remnants of an ousted Islamist group that controlled much of south-central Somalia for the last half of 2006.
The reconciliation conference, which opened Sunday and was expected to draw about 1 000 delegates, was adjourned shortly after it began as mortar shells pounded the capital. — Sapa-dpa