Uganda Picks

The head of the U.N. refugee agency said Sunday that drought-ridden Somalia is the “worst humanitarian disaster” in the world after meeting with refugees who endured unspeakable hardship to reach the world’s largest refugee camp.

The Kenyan camp, Dadaab, is overflowing with tens of thousands of newly arrived refugees forced into the camp by the parched landscape in the region where Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya meet. The World Food Program estimates that 10 million people already need humanitarian aid. The U.N. Children’s Fund estimates that more than 2 million children are malnourished and in need of lifesaving action.

Antonio Guterres, the head of UNHCR who visited Dadaab on Sunday, appealed to the world to supply the “massive support” needed by thousands of refugees showing up at this camp every week. More than 380,000 refugees now live there.

The UN says over 11 million people in the region known as the Horn of Africa need emergency assistance after what is considered the worst drought in 60 years.

Many have left their homes seeking help in large refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, making it easier for aid groups to reach them but raising the prospect of disease epidemics from large population movements and poor sanitation.

The UN has not yet declared the current food crisis a famine, but Brian Stewart, a distinguished senior fellow at the Munk School for Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, told CBC News that the UN is expected to declare a famine in some areas of Somalia within 48 hours.

In parts of the Horn of Africa, food insecurity has already reached emergency levels — one level below famine. “Famine/catastrophe” is the worst-case scenario on a five-level scale used to gauge food security.

The scale uses several indicators to declare a famine, including acute malnutrition in more than 30 per cent of children, at least two deaths per 10,000 people every day and access to less than four litres of water a day. Large-scale displacement of people, civil strife and pandemic illness are also taken into consideration.

The drought has increased the number of malnourished children in some regions, displaced thousands of people and killed thousands of animals. Officials in a central Somali region said 18 people died of drought-related effects.

“The situation is dire. It is an added vulnerability to an already extremely vulnerable people,” the U.N.’s humanitarian chief, Valerie Amos, told The Associated Press after touring camps for displaced people in Somalia’s semiautonomous region of Puntland on Wednesday.

Amos’s one-day trip was intended, she said, “to remind the people that there is still a long, ongoing problem in Somalia. I don’t want the people to forget Somalia. When you have an ongoing problem anywhere in the world, it is easy to slip it from the agenda.”

The drought is the latest in a long line of problems for Somalia, which has been mired in conflict since 1991, when warlords toppled the country’s last central government and then turned on each other.

According to the U.N., the malnutrition rate among children has jumped to 30 percent in Somalia’s southern Juba region, a figure that is double the emergency threshold. Food prices have soared up to 80 percent in some regions.

The price increase in the south is attributable in part to traders who are hoarding the food to profit off the drought, said Grainne Moloney, the head of the U.N.’s food security and nutrition analysis unit in Nairobi, Kenya.