AVOIDABLE mass starvation could hit the Horn of Africa and nearby nations as drought exacerbates fighting and the world fails to fund lifesaving aid, it is claimed.
The UN’s refugee agency has won two Nobel Prizes since 1950.However, this massive organisation, which has almost 11,000 staff in nearly 130 countries, says it is unable to meet the enormous need in a clutch of neighbouring countries with complex problems and millions of people at risk of malnutrition and starvation.
Six years ago drought in the region cost more than 260,000 lives.
More than half of those killed were children aged five or younger.
Yesterday the agency appealed to the international community for the help needed to avoid suffering and death on a catastrophic scale.
Speaking in Geneva, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesman Adrian Edwards said: “The risk of mass deaths from starvation among populations in the Horn of Africa, Yemen and Nigeria is growing.
“This warning is in light of droughts that are also affecting many neighbouring countries and a funding shortfall that has become so severe that an avoidable humanitarian crisis in the region, possibly worse than that of 2011, is fast becoming an inevitability.”
On that disaster, Edwards said: “A repeat must be avoided at all costs.”
However, he revealed UNHCR operations were grossly underfunded, with the agency securing as little as three per cent of the money needed in some areas.
He said: “Our operations in South Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen are today funded at between three and 11 percent. It is now urgent that the shortfalls be addressed.”
A total of 20 million people – almost four times the population of Scotland – live in drought-hit areas, including 4.2 million refugees.
A number of harvests have failed and malnutrition is high, with children and breastfeeding mothers hardest hit.
In one area of Ethiopia alone, almost 80 per cent of newly arrived refugees from Somalia aged six months to five years suffer from acute malnourishment.
Edwards said children “account for the majority of refugees” in the region, including more than 60 per cent of those leaving South Sudan.
A total of 60,000 South Sudanese were expected to cross to Sudan this year. However, the UNHCR has now tripled this to 180,000, with another 400,000 expected in Uganda.
Last month it emerged that as many as 3,000 are entering Uganda every day as a result of a civil war fuelled by ethnic tensions that has killed tens of thousands and severely disrupted farming, triggering famine in parts of the country.
Another one million South Sudanese are said to face this fate and stories coming out of the country tell of parents forced to choose which of their children eats each day and mothers trying to share one cup of rice between six people.
But the UN’s World Food Programme, which distributes aid in the region, does not have supplies for all.
Rations have been cut by up to 75 per cent in Uganda, which is home to some of the world’s largest refugee camps.
Portions in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Rwanda have also fallen between 12 and 50 per cent.
In Yemen, which was already one of the world’s poorest countries before a Saudi-led coalition backed one side of its civil war in 2015, bombing and port blockades leave supplies rotting offshore as 17 million suffer a lack of food.
Desperation sees some attempt to cross the Gulf of Aden to Somalia, where almost 280,000 have fled their homes in the last three months as a result of long-running power struggles between rival factions.
Displaced people also flow the other way across this stretch of water – last month more than 40 Somalis died when a boat taking them to Yemen was reportedly attacked by a military helicopter.
And in oil-rich Nigeria, seven million people can no longer feed themselves. More than five million people in part of just three states are expected to face the worst levels of food insecurity by the summer.
Meanwhile, the disruption risks the futures of hundreds of thousands of children, with almost 600 Ethiopian schools closed and 175,000 learners in drought-affected parts of Kenya no longer attending lessons.
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