Food shortages worsen as piracy slows aid delivery

Hundreds of thousands of people in southern Somalia face the prospect of worsening food shortages, as poor seasonal rains coincide with severe difficulties in transporting food aid to the country.

"This is the worst cereal production in the south in the past 10 years," said El-Rashid Hammad, Programme Co-ordinator for the United Nations’ World Food Programme's (WFP) Somalia office.

At the same time, the World Food Programme says it cannot move food aid to Somalia the easiest way, by sea, because of piracy along the country's Indian Ocean coast. It has had to resort to sending food the hard way, by road from Kenya, instead.

WFP's first food convoy from Kenya to Somalia in nearly five years arrived in the small town of Wajid in central Somalia’s Bakool region on Sunday, bringing much needed relief to residents.

"We are having to use land convoys just when the humanitarian situation in southern Somalia is deteriorating," said Zlatan Milisic, WFP’s Country Director for Somalia.

"It couldn't happen at a worse time. If the current rains in the south are failing, there will be severe food shortages, so WFP must rapidly increase deliveries to the south, and that will be very difficult," he added.

As food scarcities worsen, some people who have recently returned to Wajid from Kenya and Somaliland, have been eating wild leaves to survive.

"We lost all our livestock because even the grass dried up, and people are wandering in the bushes in search of ‘aran’ [edible wild leaves]," said Habiba Nur, a 77-year-old grandmother who said she came to Wajid hoping to find food aid in the town.

But she arrived at a time when WFP's warehouses were empty because of the delay in food deliveries. "I have been begging from whoever had something to eat," said Nur.

Next to her, Nishey Iman, 22, and her sickly-looking three-year-old, Farhiya, sat removing aran leaves from twigs before boiling them. It would be the only meal they would have that day.

"This is all we have to eat. We need milk for the children, but there is none," said Iman.

WFP says that it costs 25-30 percent more for it to bring food aid to Somalia by road. The 14 WFP lorries arrived in Wajid after a 1,200-kilometre drive from the Kenyan port of Mombasa. They had had to pass through 25 militia roadblocks in Somalia.

WFP on Sunday distributed some of the newly-arrived food to 720 internally displaced people and returnees. The convoy of WFP-contracted trucks was loaded with 500 tonnes of food.

The Deyr (short) rains were three weeks late in October, with scattered showers insufficient for crops and pasture.

The Food Security Analysis Unit, a UN-managed, donor-funded agency that asseses food security in Somalia, has forecast that total cereal production in the Horn of Africa country from June 2005 to May 2006 could be the lowest in a decade.

Out of more than one million people in Somalia whom WFP aims to reach, 640,000 people are living in the south. It says the hardest-hit districts are Gedo, Bakol and Middle and Lower Juba.

According to WFP, malnutrition rates in many parts of southern Somalia hit by conflict, droughts and floods, are already high, with up to 20 percent acute malnutrition among children under the age of five in some areas.