Scores Of Somalis Face Famine as Drought Enters Fifth Year

By Staff, Agencies

The situation at a refugee camp in the Somali border town of Dollow is desperate. Hundreds of people have arrived there in the past few days.

As water drums wait to be filled, newly displaced people are sweeping the dry and dusty land as they prepare to set up tents.

Several days earlier, the United Nations warned that hundreds of thousands of people in Somalia are facing starvation, after almost four years of drought.

Experts believe that the climate shocks are now coming more frequently and for longer periods of time, giving people and the country less time to recover and prepare for the next one.

‘Some 300,000 people are looking down the barrel of catastrophic food insecurity and many of them are coming here,’ says Petroc Wilton, a World Food Program spokesperson.

‘This section behind me wasn't here 48 hours ago. Hundreds of thousands of people are flooding into these camps, looking for assistance every day. You can really see the scale of the problem,’ he said.

Wilton says urgent action is required to prevent the situation from getting much worse.