UN agency launches urgent appeal for 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.