U.S. Urges Global Action on Horn of Africa Famine

Some 29,000 Somali children have died as famine rakes the Horn of Africa in the worst humanitarian crisis in a generation, U.S. officials said Wednesday, pleading for global partners to urgently step up aid.

Despite the dire warnings and images of starving children coming out of the region, and especially war-torn Somalia, the international community has been slow in coming forward with aid.

People in Somalia are suffering the most due to the instability caused by the country's 20-year civil war and because al-Qaida-linked Shebab militants have been blocking aid to starving Somalis and preventing them from fleeing to neighboring Ethiopia or Kenya to escape the famine.

"Based on nutrition and mortality surveys... we estimate that more than 29,000 children under five -- nearly four percent of children -- have died in the last 90 days in southern Somalia," Nancy Lindborg, assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), told lawmakers.

"It is the most severe humanitarian crisis in a generation, affecting food security for more than 12 million people across Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and surrounding areas," Democratic Senator Chris Coons said as he opened the hearing.

The United Nations estimates that 3.2 million people in Somalia require "immediate, life-saving humanitarian assistance," Lindborg noted.

All but 400,000 of Somalis in urgent need live in the south of the country, which is controlled by Shebab and other militant groups.

Some 2,000 Somalis are pouring into refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya each day seeking to escape famine and war, officials said at the hearing.

"Brief visits to the health clinics in the refugee camps revealed dozens of malnourished children, so emaciated and weak that they appeared close to death," said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Reuben Brigety.

According to the U.N. Children's Fund, around 2.3 million children in the Horn of Africa are acutely malnourished and half a million are at death's door because of the drought and famine.

The United Nations declared the famine had spread to three new regions of Somalia, including the capital Mogadishu and the world's largest camp for displaced people, and warned that it could affect the entire southern region within four to six weeks.

Last month, the world body had declared famine in the southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions.

But even though the famine is expected to worsen and eventually dwarf the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, which claimed nearly a million lives, the public is not stepping up to try to help as it did nearly 30 years ago, when the international community responded to the crisis with fundraisers like Live Aid.

According to Coons, only half of the $2 billion that the United Nations has said is needed to provide emergency assistance for famine relief in the Horn of Africa has been committed, with the United States the largest single donor, pledging $459 million.

"The international community must join the United States and many others in providing this critical aid in the near term in order to save lives, especially those of malnourished children and others in desperate need," said Coons.

"Especially in difficult budgetary times, the humanitarian response to this crisis must be a shared, transnational obligation."

Jeremy Konyndyk, director of policy and advocacy at the non-profit Mercy Corps, described "landscapes full of dead and dying livestock" in the Horn of Africa and "villages completely emptied by the drought because people simply cannot get water and they've had to go elsewhere."

He said the international community has yet to recognize the severity of the crisis, and called for more global aid to end the "truly desperate situation" in east Africa.

"We're seeing just a fraction of the engagement and the level of resources that we saw after the Haiti earthquake, for example," Konyndyk added, even though more people have been affected by the famine in the Horn of Africa than make up the total population of Haiti.