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UN AGENCY LAUNCHES URGENT APPEAL TO
STAVE OFF DROUGHT DISASTER IN SOMALIA
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is expanding its operations
in Somalia's northern Sool Plateau in the face of the worst drought
to hit the region in more than two decades and is appealing urgently
for more funds to "prevent widescale malnutrition and stave
off a humanitarian disaster".
The agency will begin distributing food this week to more than 60,000
vulnerable people facing severe shortages.
"Both the people and their livestock are in a dire situation,"
WFP Representative for Somalia, Robert Hauser, said in a statement
in Nairobi, Kenya. "WFP urgently needs more funds if we're
to continue our planned assistance over the next five months.
"We need some $6.5 million to buy about 8,600 tons of food
aid. If the resources were available, we would expand assistance
beyond the 64,000 people to an additional 41,200 needy people in
18 villages," Mr. Hauser added.
The Sool Plateau, covering parts of Sool and Sanaag districts in
Somaliland, as well as parts of Bari district in Puntland, an autonomous
territory in northern Somalia, have suffered three consecutive years
of drought. In July, WFP began distributing badly needed assistance
in collaboration with the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF). Supplementary
rations were provided to the most vulnerable people at health centres
in 12 villages.
WFP is now extending its supplementary food distributions to a further
26 villages. Some 64,000 of the most disadvantaged people in Somaliland
and Puntland will receive rations of maize and beans and vegetable
oil.
Pastoral families in rural Somalia depend largely on the sale of
animals and milk to survive. But wells and watering holes have dried
up over the past three years and herds of livestock have been devastated.
Among the animals that have survived, many are too thin to be sold
and their reproductive rates have dropped. Consequently, milk production
has plummeted, at a time when prices for rice, a staple food, have
soared. In previous years, a 50 kilogram bag of rice cost one goat;
this year it costs two or three goats.
