The head of the United Nations refugee agency said drought-ridden Somalia was the “worst humanitarian disaster” in the world.
The comments by Antonio Guterres, the head of UNHCR, came after he met starving people who had reached the world’s largest refugee camp.
The Kenyan camp Dadaab is overflowing with tens of thousands of newly arrived refugees forced into the camp by the parched landscape in the region where Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya meet.
The World Food Programme estimates that 10 million people already need humanitarian aid, and the UN Children’s Fund estimates that more than two million youngsters are malnourished and in need of life-saving action.
Mr Guterres appealed to the world to supply the “massive support” needed by thousands of refugees showing up at this camp every week. More than 380,000 refugees now live there.
In Dadaab, he spoke to a Somalia mother who lost three of her children during a 35-day walk to reach the camp. “I became a bit insane after I lost them,” said the mother, Muslima Aden. “I lost them in different times on my way.”
Mr Guterres said Dadaab held “the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable of the vulnerable”.
Mr Guterres, who is on a tour of the region, said: “The mortality rates we are witnessing are three times the level of emergency ceilings,” he said. “The level of malnutrition of the children coming in is 50%. That is enough to explain why a very high level of mortality is inevitable."
Up to 2,000 Somali refugees are crossing the border into Ethiopia every day, UNHCR said. Thousands of families arrive in poor conditions often after walking for days in search of food.
Mr Guterres said the influx was overwhelming for UNHCR and other international and local aid organisations: “Nothing can compare to what we have seen this month.” “I believe Somalia represents the worst humanitarian disaster in the world,” he said.
The camps are full and lack capacity to provide the Somali people with food and shelter.
This makes effective health treatment almost impossible, said Jerome Souquet, head of Doctors Without Borders at the Dollo Ado camps.
“We can treat the severely malnourished children, but they will definitely come back to us underfed because there is not enough food and almost all of them suffer from diarrhoea,” he said.
The epicentre of the drought lies on the three-way border shared by Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, a nomadic region where families heavily depend on the health of their livestock. Uganda and Djibouti have also been hit.
The World Food Programme says it expects 10 million people in the Horn of Africa to need food assistance. WFP currently provides food aid to six million people in East Africa.
Somalis desperate for food are also overrunning Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp in neighbouring Kenya, which is seeing some 10,000 new arrivals each week, six times the average at this time last year.
The UN’s refugee agency says Dadaab’s three camps now host more than 382,000 people, while thousands more are waiting at reception centres outside the camp.
AP