“The humanitarian context in Somalia is worsening faster than we originally projected and expected,” said George Conway, the top U.N. aid official in Somalia, a situation made worse by the unresolved conflict in the Middle East and the ongoing global supply chain crisis that has resulted.
“Children are paying the highest price. Nearly two million young children are acutely malnourished, meaning they are dangerously malnourished and physically weakened, putting them at high risk of illness or death,” Mr. Conway emphasized.
“Nearly half a million people are so severely malnourished that they need urgent treatment to survive.“added the veteran humanitarian.
The consequences of the war in the Middle East
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), meanwhile, highlighted numerous places where medical care to treat acute hunger-related illnesses is no longer available or strained by supply chain delays, “due to all the disruptions happening in the Middle East,” said spokesman Ricardo Pires.
Nearly one in three people in Somalia are critically food insecure, according to the latest UN-backed expert assessment of the IIntegrated Food Safety Phase Classification (IPC) platform. It defines famine as a situation in which at least one in five households suffers from an extreme lack of food and faces hunger and destitution, resulting in extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition and death.
Help is most urgently needed in the southwestern state, where the UN has confirmed “A real and credible risk of famine in the Barakaba district.”Mr. Conway continued.
While the people of Somalia have endured drought since 2024, the current Gu rainy season from April to June has brought some relief in localized areas. But there is growing concern that there will not be enough rain, which will increase the need for humanitarian assistance that is already proving prohibitively expensive.
Fuel price increases
“Given the drought situation and the depletion of water sources, many communities depend on transporting water by truck,” Conway said. “And the cost of transporting water obviously increases with the crisis with the cost of fuel. So, in some places, we have seen water prices for transporting water triple over the course of the last month.”
Ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTF) are the gold standard treatment for children suffering from severe hunger, but their continued supply is also in doubt, the longer the Middle East crisis continues to impact fuel prices and, in particular, air travel.
“We have a factory in Nairobi that produces much of the RUTF we supply to Africa and other countries, but Somalia is a specific case where transporting these supplies by road is not as feasible,” explained UNICEF’s Mr. Pires. “We depend on air travel and obviously with fuel going up and fuel prices going up so significantly, it’s going to be very difficult to manage that cost going forward… It’s a matter of life and death for them.”
