Thousands of refugees threatened by food shortage

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says thousands of refugees in northern Kenya face food shortages in the coming months unless the organisation gets immediate assistance.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the WFP said it "urgently requires US $14 million to prevent cuts in food rations and to continue feeding 221,000 refugees in Kenya up to the end of December 2004."

It warned that "if further donations are not made immediately", by April the agency would run out of cereals and by June would have no food supplies for the refugees.

"The imminent cut in food rations will put at risk the health and lives of refugees, especially women and children," the statement quoted Tesema Negash, the WFP country director in Kenya, as saying.

"We have seen the negative impact on refugees in camps when we have had to cut rations below the minimum 2,100 kilocalories required to carry out a healthy and active life. Malnutrition levels have increased and refugees become more vulnerable to disease. We have to avoid that," he added.

The majority of the refuges, who live in the Kakuma and Dadaab camps, are from Somalia and southern Sudan and have been there since 1991, when civil war and armed conflict forced them to flee their homeland.