Overview
Somalia is one of the most dangerous places in the world, and the Horn of Africa country with probably the highest humanitarian needs – not least for food assistance – compared to the size of its population (listen to interview by BBC's Mike Thompson). By August 2009, the country was facing its worst humanitarian crisis since the famine of 1991/1992, with half the population – 3.64 million people – now in need of outside assistance.
Despite growing insecurity, including rampant piracy on the high seas, WFP scaled up its operations in the first half of 2009, providing food assistance to a total of 2.87 million people in Somalia because of conflict, displacement, and drought. The killings of four WFP staff between August 2008 and January 2009 prompted WFP to seek security commitments from local administrations and armed groups in much of South and Central Somalia.
Fierce fighting in Mogadishu from 7 May onwards forced more than 210,000 people to flee their homes in the capital – the biggest exodus since the Ethiopian intervention in 2007. An estimated 1.55 million people are internally displaced in Somalia. In addition, more than 36,000 Somalis fled as refugees into Kenya in the first half of the year.
FAO's Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU) puts the number in need of humanitarian assistance in 2009 at 3.64 million people. An estimated 285,000 Somali children (or one in every five) are acutely malnourished, including 70,000 severely malnourished. WFP aims to provide food assistance to 3.5 million people, including 300,000 women and children threatened by malnutrition.
To do this, naval escorts for ships carrying WFP food continue to be absolutely essential to ward off the ever-present threat of piracy. Over 90 percent of all WFP food for Somalia is delivered by sea. 2009 is the worst year yet for piracy in Somali waters, yet since the naval escort system started in November 2007 not a single ship loaded with WFP food heading to a port in Somalia has been attacked. The European Union is providing naval escorts for 2009.
Without escorts, shippers are nervous of delivering into Somalia, and frequently refuse to do so. Somalia is a least developed, low-income, food-deficit country. Somalia doesn’t even appear in UNDP’s Human Development Index of 177 countries because of a lack of comparable data since 2001.
The situation in South and Central Somalia is aggravated by civil strife, insecurity and consecutive seasons of poor rains. Somalia has some of the world’s worst health indicators. Life expectancy at birth is 46.2 years. A quarter of children die before they reach five.
WFP Activities
WFP scaled up the number of people it reached with food assistance in Somalia in the first half of 2009. WFP then reduced the amount of food provided to some people in South and Central Somalia in July, August and September during the main Gu harvest because of forecasts of good production in many areas, declining cereal prices, and an increase in labour wages and livestock values, meaning increased purchasing power for both rural and urban people. Given sufficient resources and access, WFP plans once more to increase the number of people reached with food assistance from October onwards.
Fierce fighting in Mogadishu forced our partners in June to suspend cooked meals made from WFP food provided at 16 centres on a daily basis to some 80,000 people. WFP however continued to unload ships at Mogadishu port and started construction in July of a WFP warehouse as part of a special operation to rehabilitate the port to allow bigger ships to discharge. The provision of cooked meals has since resumed.
Since taking over responsibility for providing food assistance to drought-stricken central Somalia following the withdrawal of an international NGO, a total of more than 100,000 children under the age of five in Galgadud and neighbouring Mudug region received WFP food. A FSNAU nutrition survey in May found an important decrease in malnutrition across central Somalia.
