Six million people in Somalia are facing acute food insecurity, the United Nation's World Food Program said.

It added that it has only a tenth of the resources it had in 2022 when it helped avert famine in the drought- and conflict-stricken East African nation.

“We can only do the bare minimum,” WFP executive director Carl Skau said at a nutrition centre on the outskirts of the capital, Mogadishu. “We’re only providing these nutrition supplies to the children that are really the worst hit.”

The reduced funds, because of cuts in international aid by donors and the redirection of resources to other humanitarian crises, meant that the WFP is unable to expand its assistance in Somalia, Skau said.

The WFP projects that 1.9 million children under the age of five in the country will suffer acute malnutrition this year, including nearly 500,000 who will require urgent treatment for severe acute malnutrition.

Overall, around 30 percent of the population faces critical levels of food insecurity, the UN has said.

“We had 10 times more resources than now,” Skau said of the 2022 hunger emergency that was caused by a prolonged drought. “We were able to step in, and we prevented a famine here in Somalia."

The consequences of the current food shortage, which is also a result of drought, conflict and the displacement of people, are seen at the Feynuus Health Centre in Mogadishu’s Kahda district.

Dozens of women carrying babies waited beneath a large tree or crowded along the veranda of the corrugated-metal facility seeking help.

Halima Mohamed Hassan, a mother of six, had walked nearly three kilometres carrying her malnourished four-year-old child. She is pregnant, but said she hadn't eaten for two days. Her last meal was plain rice.

The Feynuus centre receives between 250 and 350 patients daily, mainly displaced women and children from regions outside Mogadishu. (AP)



Edited by Altis Wong