About 6.5 million people in Somalia face acute hunger due to drought, UN says

About 6.5 million people in Somalia face acute hunger due to drought, the government and the United Nations said on Tuesday, sounding the alarm days after the U.N.'s food agency warned that food aid could grind to a halt by April without new funding.

Somalia declared a national drought emergency in November after years of failed rains, and other countries in the region have also been hit.

More than a third of those facing acute malnutrition are children, Somalia's government and the United Nations Somalia said in a joint statement. The crisis has forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes, with many crowding into camps in Mogadishu and other cities.

"The drought ... has deepened alarmingly, with soaring water prices, limited food supplies, dying livestock, and very little humanitarian funding," George Conway, the U.N.'s Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, said in a statement.

Hawo Abdi said she lost two children to illness after the drought laid waste to her homeland in Somalia's Bay region.

"When I saw that the suffering was getting worse, I fled my home and came to ... Mogadishu," she told Reuters from her shelter on the outskirts of the capital.

Last week, the U.N. World Food Programme put the number of those facing acute hunger at 4.4 million, and said it had already cut back its assistance to just over 600,000 people from 2.2 million earlier this year.

It was not clear whether the new figure reflected a sharp increase in those at risk or different counting methods.

The government and United Nations figures tally with those also released on Tuesday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which sets the global standard for determining the severity of a food crisis.

While rainfall in the April to June season could offer some relief, some 5.5 million people were expected to remain in the crisis level or worse, with 1.6 million people in the emergency level, the statement said.

Abdiyo Ali was forced to abandon her farm in the Lower Shabelle region.

"Our farms were destroyed, our livestock died, and water sources became too far away. We have nothing left to bring with us," Ali told Reuters last week while preparing her food in a displaced people's camp outside Mogadishu.

-Abdi Sheikh and Abdirahman Hussein/Reuters