DAVOS, Switzerland (SONNA) \u2014 The head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning World Food Program says support from donors like the United States and Germany have allowed it to postpone \u2014 though not entirely avert \u2014 famine in Somalia\u00a0but stressed that \u201cwe\u2019re not out of this yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
WFP Executive Director David Beasley said countries in the Horn of Africa have faced \u201cunprecedented climate impact\u201d from\u00a0years of drought, and the U.N. agency had been expecting to announce famine in Somalia before donors \u201cstepped up in magnificent ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we\u2019ve been able to \u2014 I don\u2019t know if the right word is \u2018avert\u2019 famine \u2014 but we definitely have\u00a0postponed it,\u201d he told The Associated Press at the\u00a0World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday. \u201cWe\u2019ve been fortunate so far, given the climate shocks inside Somalia. But we\u2019re not out of this yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he warned that \u201cwe still could end up with a famine technically in Somalia\u201d because \u201cfamine-like conditions\u201d already exist.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce you officially declare to be a famine, well, it\u2019s too late,\u201d Beasley said.<\/p>\n
Famine is the extreme lack of food and a significant death rate from outright starvation or malnutrition combined with diseases like cholera. A formal famine declaration means data shows more than a fifth of households have extreme food gaps, more than 30% of children are acutely malnourished and over two people out of 10,000 are dying every day.<\/p>\n
Beasley, who has announced plans to step down in April, has parlayed his political experience as a former Republican governor of the U.S. state of South Carolina to wrest greater funding for the World Food Program from Washington under both the Biden and Trump administrations.<\/p>\n
The United States announced $411 million in additional funding for Somalia\u2019s crisis last month after a report by the U.N. and other experts said more than 8 million Somalis are badly food insecure because of drought and\u00a0high food prices. Thousands have died.<\/p>\n
Source: AP<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DAVOS, Switzerland (SONNA) \u2014 The head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning World Food Program says support from donors like the United States and Germany have allowed it to postpone \u2014 though not entirely avert \u2014 famine in Somalia\u00a0but stressed that \u201cwe\u2019re not out of this yet.\u201d WFP Executive Director David Beasley said countries in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":412324,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-412323","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-local"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412323"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412325,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412323\/revisions\/412325"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}