International donors have funded only about a third of a $637 million aid appeal for Somalia, where drought, violence and record food prices threaten a disaster, a senior UN official warned on Tuesday. Mark Bowden, the UN resident and humanitarian co-ordinator for Somalia, said just 37 percent of the amount needed had been received and the country was on the verge of crisis.
At the start of this year, the United Nations estimated that 2.6 million Somalis were in need of emergency aid. "We're now estimating that by the end of the year 3.5 million people will need assistance ... which is a frightening figure to have to deal with," Bowden told reporters.
"We fear that we're moving into a very acute crisis in Somalia over the next few months ... we need far more support externally to be able to do what is probably one of the most difficult relief jobs going in the world at the moment." Most aid agencies have discussed suspending operations in parts of Somalia hit by mounting insecurity and a recent wave of assassinations targeting senior local humanitarian workers.
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that the violence threatens to wreck all efforts to resolve a humanitarian emergency that could soon rival the country's famine in the early 1990s. Hundreds of thousands died then. More than 8,000 civilians have been killed and 1 million forced from their homes since the start of last year by fighting between the interim government and Islamist insurgents. Aid workers say some 14.6 million people across the region will need food aid or some other form of assistance. Ethiopia has at least 4.6 million people directly affected, and malnutrition rates are also rising in neighbouring Eritrea.
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