Hunger starts to claim lives in east Africa

Despite continuous appeal for urgent funding by humanitarian organizations to respond to the worsening hunger crisis in east Africa, the International Rescue Committee has warned that people have started to die from starvation, especially in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.

While the organization did not give the exact figure of the number of people who have starved to death, it said its teams on the ground had reported such deaths and has further warned that the window to prevent mass deaths is rapidly closing.

In a crisis alert update to its annual emergency watchlist released on Tuesday, the humanitarian organization said three million people in the three countries are facing emergency and catastrophic levels of hunger, and risk death unless urgent international funding is provided.

It said the ongoing crisis in Ukraine combined with the increasingly detrimental impact of climate change, conflict and COVID-19 has driven east Africa into a predictable crisis dangerously neglected by the international community.

The International Rescue Committee said following four consecutive failed rains, hunger in the region has been worsening week by week outstripping the limited available funds.

It warned that the number of hungry people in the three countries is projected to hit 20 million by September.

The organization said since January, the number of people going hungry in Somalia due to drought has nearly doubled, while in Kenya those on the brink of famine conditions has tripled.

In one of IRC's nutrition clinics in Somalia's capital Mogadishu, from April to May, the organization has witnessed a 265 percent increase in admissions for children under the age of five suffering from severe malnutrition.

Against this dire backdrop, the organization said east Africa has struggled to attract the attention and funding it desperately requires.

IRC said while billions of dollars of aid have been made available for the response in Ukraine, the international community has failed to respond to its global fallout, including skyrocketing food and fuel prices.

It said east Africa has been hit particularly hard because it imports 90 percent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine.

"There is nothing natural about famines in the 21st century. While a complex set of factors are driving extreme hunger, the slide into famine and mass death is man-made, driven by international inaction," David Miliband, the president and chief executive officer of the IRC, said.

"This crisis was predictable and preventable. It has been unfolding over two years of repeated warnings and worsening hunger. What we are witnessing is an unnatural disaster of catastrophic proportions."

Miliband said the crisis engulfing east Africa is emblematic of the failure of the international system: failure of prevention, failure of response and failure of leadership.

He said severe underfunding of humanitarian responses is depriving millions of the assistance they need to survive.

With a fifth failed rain on the horizon, the organization warned that drought in east Africa is now the longest-running in decades.

During the peak of the 2011 famine, which affected 14 million people, 30,000 people were dying each month, totaling to at least 260,000 deaths.

The organization said response should seek to apply lessons from previous efforts to avert famine with rapid investment in proven approaches including cash assistance to meet the needs of food-insecure communities.

It also recommends that donors should fully fund the humanitarian responses across the region, and directly fund frontline non-governmental organizations, who can scale up quickly.

The organization also called for mobilization of resources for humanitarian access negotiations and addressing of global trade challenges stemming from the conflict in Ukraine.