The Sunday News
New York – South Sudan’s food crisis is now the worst in the world, the UN Security Council said on Friday as it called for urgent funding to step up deliveries of desperately-needed aid.
Some 3,9 million people – a staggering one in three people throughout the country – are going hungry as the fighting in South Sudan continues, according to UN officials.
The Security Council described a “catastrophic food insecurity situation in South Sudan that is now the worst in the world” and said the country was on the threshold of a full-blown famine if fighting continued.
It called on countries that pledged $618 million in aid for South Sudan at a conference in May to make good on their promises and to increase their commitment.
Fighting erupted in South Sudan in December, sparked by a power struggle between President Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar.
The 15-member Council also condemned the latest round of fighting around the town of Nasir and reminded the warring sides that attacks against civilians may lead to war crimes prosecutions.
Meanwhile, over 350 000 people in Somalia’s war-ravaged capital are in acute need of food aid as government and charities struggle to cope, the UN warned yesterday, with other cities also in crisis.
“The food security situation has worsened as early warnings highlight drought conditions in parts of Somalia,” a report from the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) said.
“Aid organisations have been unable to meet the needs of over 350 000 estimated displaced people in Mogadishu,” it added, warning of “alarming malnutrition rates” in the capital.
The notice comes three years after more than 250 000 people, half of them children, died in the devastating 2011 famine.
Somalia’s internationally-backed government, selected in 2012, was widely hailed as offering the best chance in decades to repair the war-ravaged country.
But reports of a hunger crisis inside the capital casts a further pall over the government’s record, following accusations of corruption as well as continued attacks by Islamist al-Shabaab insurgents against even the most fortified areas.
The report blamed “funding shortages and a volatile security situation, which has at times restricted aid delivery into the settlements”. — AFP
