Somalia: 'Humanitarian Situation has significantly worsened' - Press Conference | United Nations

UN agencies warned the humanitarian situation in Somalia has “significantly worsened”, citing the latest food security report, “with 6.5 million people - a third of the population - facing crisis levels of hunger through March this year.” World Food Programme (WFP)’s Ross Smith and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s Rein Paulsen briefed reporters today (25 Feb) on the recently released Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) for Somalia. They both briefed via video links from Rome. The report was released on Tuesday (24 Feb). WFP’s Ross Smith said, “malnutrition is deepening, in 2026, we have over 1.8 million children under the age of five facing acute malnutrition, with half of these expected face severe malnutrition. And these are really alarming numbers for a country the size of Somalia.” Smith also highlighted the urgent need for funding WFP’s activities in Somalia. He said, “the lifesaving emergency food and nutrition assistance that we provide, the support from other partners will be forced to be cut to the most vulnerable and eventually will come to an end post April.” The WFP official continued, “Due to these critical funding shortfalls, our assistance WFP assistance has decreased from 64 districts to 42, leaving entire areas without food assistance. And we're currently only assisting just over 600,000 of the 6.5 million people facing crisis levels of hunger. This is down from 2.2 million people that we supported this time last year.” Smith pointed out that life saving nutrition services have also been slashed by more than half. He said, “from over 400,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women and children under five receiving support to just about 100,000 in January of this year.” He added, “cash transfers have been significantly reduced, and this is critical to mention because there are many places where access is limited and where markets are still functioning and cash transfers are the only option for support in Somalia.” For his part, FAO’s Rein Paulsen highlighted the drought in the country is having a “devastating” effect on agriculture. He explained, “concretely, this means widespread crops and livestock losses in addition to large scale displacements of people. And when reference was made to two rainy seasons that were misses, just to put that in number terms, when it comes to food production, the last main cereal harvest was 83 per cent lower than the long term average, between 1995 and 2025.” Paulsen also said, “what's unfolding in Somalia now needs to be and should be understood primarily as a rural crisis, not exclusively, but primarily.” He explained that two thirds of the drought hotspots, 19 of the 30 hotspots identified in this IPC analysis are in rural areas in the country. For FAO activities, it needs 85 million US dollars to support a million of the most vulnerable, high risk, underserved rural people at the moment, Paulsen said, adding “to date, we have just six million US dollars to respond, so we are really running on fumes.”


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