The World Food Programme airlifted 10 tonnes of emergency supplies to Mogadishu yesterday to feed thousands of malnourished children in drought-hit Somalia.
Somalia is the Horn of Africa country worst affected by a prolonged drought – the region’s worst in 60 years – that has put some 12 million people in danger of starvation and spurred a global fund-raising campaign.
Pictures and footage of skeletal children with only a faint flicker of life left in them have conjured up memories of the 1984 Ethiopia famine in which an estimated one million people died.
The peanut-based paste flown to Mogadishu yesterday was the first in a series of deliveries which aims to supply 100 tonnes of the nutritional supplement to 35,000 children every month, a spokesman said.
The scope of the catastrophe is huge though and delivering aid to one of the most dangerous countries in the world is difficult.
Nearly half of Somalia’s estimated 10 million people are in need of relief assistance, owing to the effects of relentless violence and the drought that prompted the UN to declare famine for the first time this century. Yesterday’s airlift also kicked off a series of WFP deliveries that will go to the Ethiopian town of Dolo on the border with Somalia and to the town of Wajir in northern Kenya, the spokesman added.
The WFP was forced to pull out from southern Somalia in early 2010 after they were banned by the Al Qaeda-inspired Shebab rebels, who control large areas of the region.
A handful of relief groups were however spared the insurgents’ ban, but have been struggling to cope with the rising numbers of people in need of humanitarian aid.
At the weekend, the International Red Cross said it had handed out 400 tonnes of food in drought-hit areas controlled by the hardline Shebab rebels, the first ICRC-led drops into such areas since 2009.
The bulk of Somalia’s drought-affected people are in the country’s southern regions. Last week, the UN declared famine in two southern Somalia regions of Bakool and Lower Shabelle, where up to 350,000 people are at risk of starvation. In Nairobi, a team of humanitarian organisations met with donors to streamline operations to assist victims of the drought that has also hit parts of Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and Uganda.
Aid agency Oxfam criticised French Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire for announcing this week that the Nairobi meeting – a monthly round-table between aid agencies and donors – was a major conference on the region’s crisis.
“Is the diplomatic activity stirred up by France recently not a smokescreen to hide its weak financial commitment?,” Jean-Cyril Dagorn, an Oxfam official said in a statement. Mr Dagorn said that France, which called for a donors conference on Monday in Rome as the current G20 leader, had yet to boost its pledge for more funds for the crisis.