One in five Somali children ‘acutely malnourished’

More than half Somalia’s people now need humanitarian aid and conditions in the Horn of Africa nation have been sliding since the start of the year, the United Nations has said. One-in-five children are seriously malnourished and the number of refugees has risen by more than 40% since January said a study out today. Three quarters of those in greatest need live in areas where the government is fiercely fighting insurgents for control of the country, which makes it hard for aid workers to get to them.

The UN’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis (FSNAU) report said the number of people needing humanitarian aid in Somalia has leapt 17.5 per cent in a year to 3.76 million or half the country's population. Cindy Holleman, of the Somalia FSNAU, said the increase in the number needing help from 3.2 million in August 2008, showed a serious deterioration in the emergency food security and nutrition situation. "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 told Reuters news agency. "This will not only place additional burdens on the people already in crisis, but will also make it difficult for humanitarian relief to reach the vulnerable populations most in need of humanitarian and life-saving interventions."

Somalia has not had an effective central government since 1991 and has been the scene of brutal fighting for much of that time. Since the start of 2007, violence has killed more than 18,000 Somalis and driven another 1 million from their homes. A UN-backed government nominally runs the country, but in reality much of south and central Somalia is under the control of radical Islamist groups. One in five children were now ‘acutely malnourished’, and one in twenty were ‘severely malnourished, ’ the FSNAU report found. These rates were among the highest in the world, it said. Among those needing aid were 1.4 million rural people affected by drought, 655,000 poor struggling with very high food and non-food prices, and more than 1.42 million homeless people who have fled the conflict. The number of those homeless in Somalia has risen 40 per cent in just six months."The depth of the crisis in these areas is severe with up to 75 per cent of the total population in humanitarian emergency”, the report said.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children