KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) – More than 50 million people across the East African region are expected to face acute food insecurity this year, a regional bloc says, warning that some 300,000 in Somalia and South Sudan are projected to be under full-blown famine conditions.
The assessment by Intergovernmental Authority on Development, or IGAD, is one of the most dire yet as United Nations agencies, humanitarian groups and others continue to raise alarm over the region’s food crisis that many say has been largely neglected as the international community focuses on the war in Ukraine.
That assessment applies to seven member states of IGAD, from Djibouti to Uganda.
Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, is traveling in East Africa to spotlight the hunger crisis in the region.
She is expected to visit Ethiopia and Somalia, where some communities have suffered four consecutive failed rainy seasons.
Power earlier in the week spoke of the need to prevent the global food crisis from becoming a catastrophe.
In addition to immediate humanitarian aid, the international community must sustain investment in global agriculture and undertake concerted diplomacy “so that we mobilize more resources from donors, avoid export restrictions that can exacerbate the crisis, and lessen the burden on poor countries,” Power said in a speech Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Aid groups and other watchdogs have been calling for more funds to be devoted to East Africa after the war in Ukraine grabbed the world’s attention and money.
Three million people face “emergency and catastrophic levels of hunger, risking death,” the International Rescue Committee said in a statement Tuesday, noting that “people have already started dying from starvation and the window to prevent mass deaths is rapidly closing.”
Even if the new funding is fulfilled, “the humanitarian response plan for the region would be funded at 40% of the assessed need,” the group warned. “After just over three months, the $1.9 billion appeal for the humanitarian response in Ukraine was 85% funded — a demonstration of the capacity for resource mobilization when the political will exists.”