By Olivia Le Poidevin<\/p>\n
GENEVA, May 8 (Reuters) – Somalia faces a severe malnutrition crisis and urgently needs more aid funding to avert a catastrophe, the \u200cUnited Nations World Food Programme said on Friday, warning it may \u200cbe forced to halt humanitarian support from July without additional financing.<\/p>\n
A combination of multiple failed rain seasons, \u200bwhich have wiped out crops and livestock, and ongoing conflict and insecurity is pushing people in Somalia into dangerous levels of hunger at a time of radical cuts in foreign aid and aid shortages sparked by the war on Iran, the WFP said.<\/p>\n
Some 6 \u200cmillion people in Somalia, or \u2060almost one in three, are facing acute hunger, while 1.9 million children are acutely malnourished, according to the WFP.<\/p>\n
“Somalia faces a really \u2060severe malnutrition crisis and is one of the biggest malnutrition hotspots in the world,” Matthew Hollingworth, WFP assistant executive director for programme operations, told reporters in Geneva. He spoke \u200bvia video \u200blink from Rome.<\/p>\n
Somalia faces several overlapping conflicts, \u200bincluding a long-running Islamist insurgency \u200cby the Al-Shabaab militant group against the federal government as well as political disputes between Mogadishu and regional states over power and security.<\/p>\n
The situation in the country bears similar warning signs to 2022, when Somalia was on the brink of famine following a prolonged drought, but the difference this time is that aid agencies do \u200cnot have the funding to respond at a \u200bmassive scale, the WFP said.<\/p>\n
The agency, which manages 90% \u200bof the food security response \u200bto Somalia, has had to reduce the number of people it \u200ccan reach to 500,000 from 2 \u200bmillion, and could have \u200bto halt its services altogether by July due to funding cuts, Hollingworth added.<\/p>\n
The WFP and the wider humanitarian sector also face widespread shortages of life-saving aid, \u200bwith Ready-to-use-Therapeutic-Food facing delays of \u200cup to 40 days, due to supply chain disruption sparked by \u200bthe war in the Middle East, Hollingworth said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin \u200bEditing by Ludwig Burger and Miranda Murray)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Olivia Le Poidevin GENEVA, May 8 (Reuters) – Somalia faces a severe malnutrition crisis and urgently needs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[114474,23127,114473,1984,16642],"class_list":{"0":"post-224949","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-somalia","8":"tag-aid-agencies","9":"tag-foreign-aid","10":"tag-severe-malnutrition","11":"tag-somalia","12":"tag-world-food-programme"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@africa\/116539242718713286","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}