UN: Almost 8 million facing hunger in Kenya, Somalia

Nairobi - Almost 8 million people in Kenya and Somalia are in need of emergency aid, as drought, rising food prices and conflict deepen a hunger crisis in East Africa, the United Nations said Tuesday. The World Food Programme (WFP) appealed for 230 million dollars in emergency aid to feed 3.8 million Kenyans over the next six months, while an assessment of neighbouring Somalia found that half of the population needed food aid. 'Red lights are flashing across the country,' Burkard Oberle, WFP Kenya Country Director, said in a statement. 'People are already going hungry, malnutrition is preying on more and more young children, cattle are dying.' The WFP said that many parts of Kenya had suffered from failed rains during the last three of four rainy seasons and that the situation was only likely to deteriorate. This year's maize harvest is predicted to be 28-per-cent lower than the last five-year average, while food prices are as much as 130 per cent above normal, the WFP said. Somalia is facing an even more acute crisis, according to the UN's Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit for Somalia (FSNAU). While roughly the same number of people require assistance - 3.67 million - this represents half the population. 'This signals a serious deterioration in the emergency food security and nutrition situation from earlier this year,' said Cindy Holleman, the Chief Technical Advisor of the Somalia FSNAU. 'More worrying is that the escalating fighting and conflict is occurring in the same areas where we are now recording the greatest problems of food access and malnutrition,' she added. The crisis is being driven largely by a bloody insurgency that kicked off in early 2007, although drought and rising food prices are contributing factors. Islamist groups are fighting to oust Western-backed President Sheikh Sharif Sheik Ahmed. Much of the fighting has taken place in heavily populated areas of the capital Mogadishu, killing an estimated 18,000 and forcing many other to flee. Almost 1.5 million Somalis have abandoned their homes to live in camps for the internally displaced. Hundreds of thousands more have fled abroad, many of them to the Dadaab refugee complex in Kenya. Somalia has been embroiled in chaos since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. In both Somalia and Kenya, children are being hit hard. The WFP said that acute malnutrition rates among children under five were over 20 per cent in some areas of Kenya. An estimated 285,000 Somali children in the same age bracket are acutely malnourished. Some 70,000 of these children face an increased risk of death without specialist care, the FSNAU said. The WFP is suffering serious shortfalls in funding, not just in Kenya, but in many countries across the Horn of Africa. The agency needs over 200 million dollars for its programmes in Ethiopia, Djibouti, Uganda and Somalia. Many aid agencies have reported serious problems in raising funds this year as Western donors struggle with recession in their own countries.