Hunger kills 260,000 in Somalia in two years

NAIROBI - Agence France-Presse

A Somalian mother, holding a medical card, waits for her baby to be given a pentavalent vaccine injection in this photo. A UN report says famine and severe food insecurity in Somalia claimed the lives of about 258,000 people. AFP photo

Almost 260,000 people, half of them young children, died of hunger during the last famine in Somalia, according to a United Nations report yesterday which admitted the global body should have done more to prevent the tragedy.

The toll is much higher than was feared at the time of the 2010-2012 food crisis in the troubled Horn of Africa country, and also exceeds the 220,000 who starved to death in the 1992 famine. “The report confirms we should have done more before the famine was declared,” said Philippe Lazzarini, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia. “Warnings that began as far back as the drought in 2010 did not trigger sufficient early action,” he said.

Half of those who died were children under five, according to the joint report by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the U.S.-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network.

“Famine and severe food insecurity in Somalia claimed the lives of about 258,000 people between October 2010 and April 2012, including 133,000 children under five,” said the report, the first scientific estimate of how many died. Somalia was the hardest hit by an extreme drought in 2011 that affected over 13 million people across the Horn of Africa.

‘Political failures’

“An estimated 4.6 percent of the total population and 10 percent of children under five died in southern and central Somalia,” the report said, saying the deaths were on top of 290,000 “baseline” deaths during the period, and double the average for sub-Saharan Africa. Philippe Lazzarini said that about 2.7 million people are still in need of life-saving assistance and support to build their livelihoods.

Famine was first declared in July 2011 in Somalia’s Southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions, but later spread to other areas, including Middle Shabelle, Afgoye and inside camps for displaced people in war-ravaged Mogadishu. The United Nations declared the famine over in February 2012.

Famine implies that at least a fifth of households face extreme food shortages, with acute malnutrition in over 30 percent of people, and two deaths per 10,000 people every day, according to the U.N. definition. The aid agency Oxfam said the deaths could and should have been prevented. “Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures,” Oxfam’s Somalia director Senait Gebregziabher said.