Somalia at ‘real risk of famine’ as Middle East war fallout continues

“The humanitarian context in Somalia is worsening faster than we originally projected and expected,” said George Conway, the UN’s top aid official in Somalia, a situation made worse by the unresolved conflict in the Middle East and the ongoing global supply chain crisis that has resulted.

“Children are paying the highest price. Nearly two million young children are acutely malnourished, meaning they're dangerously undernourished and physically weakened, placing them at high risk of illness or death,” Mr. Conway stressed.

“Almost half a million are so severely malnourished that they require urgent treatment to survive”, the veteran humanitarian added.

Middle East war fallout

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), meanwhile, highlighted numerous places where healthcare to treat disease linked to acute hunger is no longer available or stretched thin by supply chain delays, “due to all the disruptions that are happening in the Middle East”, said spokesperson Ricardo Pires.

Nearly one in three people in Somalia is critically food insecure, according to the latest UN-backed expert assessment from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) platform. It defines famine as a situation in which at least one in five households have an extreme lack of food and face starvation and destitution, resulting in extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition and death.

Assistance is needed most urgently in South West state, where the UN has confirmed “a real and credible risk of famine in Barakaba district”, Mr. Conway continued.

While Somalia’s people have endured drought since 2024, the current Gu rainy season from April to June has brought some relief in localized areas. But there are increasing concerns that not enough rain will fall, heightening the need for humanitarian assistance which is already proving prohibitively expensive.

Fuel price hikes

“Given the drought situation and the drying up of water points, a lot of communities are reliant on water trucking,” Mr. Conway said. “And the cost of water trucking obviously increases with the crisis with the cost of fuel. So, in some locations, we've seen water prices for water trucking triple over the course of the past month.”

Ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) is the go-to treatment for children suffering from severe hunger, but its continued supply is also in question, the longer the Middle East crisis continues to impact fuel prices and particularly air freight.

“We have a factory in Nairobi that produces a lot of the RUTF that we provide for Africa and other countries, but Somalia is a specific case whereby moving these supplies by road is not as feasible,” UNICEF’s Mr. Pires explained. “We depend on air freight and obviously with the fuel rising, the fuel prices rising so significantly, that cost will become very complicated for us to manage looking forward…It's a matter of life or death for them.”