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10-05-2026
NAIROBI/ GENEVA: Somalia faces a severe malnutrition crisis and urgently needs more aid funding to avert a catastrophe, the United Nations World Food Program said on Friday, warning it may be forced to halt humanitarian support from July without additional financing.
A combination of multiple failed rain seasons, which have wiped out crops and livestock, and ongoing conflict and insecurity is pushing people in Somalia into dangerous levels of hunger at a time of radical cuts in foreign aid and aid shortages sparked by the war on Iran, the WFP said.
Some 6 million people in Somalia, or almost one in three, are facing acute hunger, while 1.9 million children are acutely malnourished, according to the WFP.
“Somalia faces a really severe malnutrition crisis and is one of the biggest malnutrition hotspots in the world,” Matthew Hollingworth, WFP assistant executive director for program operations, told reporters in Geneva. He spoke via video link from Rome.
Somalia faces several overlapping conflicts, including a long-running Islamist insurgency by the Al-Shabaab militant group against the federal government as well as political disputes between Mogadishu and regional states over power and security. The situation in the country bears similar warning signs to 2022, when Somalia was on the brink of famine following a prolonged drought but the difference this time is that aid agencies do not have the funding to respond at a massive scale, the WFP said. The agency, which manages 90% of the food security response to Somalia, has had to reduce the number of people it can reach to 500,000 from 2 million, and could have to halt its services altogether by July due to funding cuts, Hollingworth added. The WFP and the wider humanitarian sector also face widespread shortages of life-saving aid, with Ready-to-use-Therapeutic-Food facing delays of up to 40 days, due to supply chain disruption sparked by the war in the Middle East, Hollingworth said.
For Somalia’s malnourished children, already suffering the twin catastrophes of looming famine and radical cuts in foreign aid, the US-Israeli war on Iran means more than soaring petrol pump prices; it is a matter of life and death.
Shortages of lifesaving therapeutic foods exacerbated by shipping disruptions are forcing clinics to turn away severely malnourished children and ration supplies, media reporting shows. Almost half a million children under 5 suffer from “severe acute malnutrition” or “wasting”, the most life-threatening form of hunger, and the delays are worsening the effect of the aid reductions.
Health workers in Baidoa and Mogadishu say they have had to stretch out meagre stocks of specialized milk and nutrient-dense peanut-based paste vital to saving these children.
“Since the needs are large and we don’t have a lot of supplies, we have had to keep reducing the amount we give children,” Nurse Hassan Yahye Kheyre said.
The 225 cartons of peanut paste remaining at his clinic, which treats more than 1,200 children, will probably be exhausted within two weeks, according to the International Rescue Committee, which supplies the facility.
“If treatment is on-and-off, the children will become very weak, physically and mentally and it may not be possible to reverse it,” Kheyre added.
The IRC is one of three aid groups that said transport delays and rising costs linked to the war in Iran were making an already complicated situation worse.
At the clinic in the southwestern city of Baidoa, run by IRC’s local partner READO, mother-of-nine Muumino Adan Aamin has been trying to get peanut paste for Ruweido, her 11-month-old daughter. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
