Breaking News English

The United Nations has officially declared Somalia’s crisis a famine in two parts of the country’s . The region is experiencing its drought for six decades and millions of people are at of starving to death. The situation is worsened because of the of supplying aid to those who need it. The decades-long between Islamist militants and the government is making it hard and dangerous to aid. The United Nations said tens of thousands of Somalis have died of malnutrition in the few months. Spokesman Mark Bowden spoke of the urgency of the situation: “If we don’t now, famine will spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia…Every day of delay in assistance is literally a of life or death.”

Mr Bowden, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, it a “desperate situation.” He said: “We that almost half of the Somali population, 3.7 million people, are affected by this crisis…It is that tens of thousands will already have died, the of these being children.” Bowden explained to Voice of America how the has become so bad, saying: “We had been hoping to avoid famine, we spent a lot of our …specifically to help those communities that we thought might migrate, to migrations which is one of the causes of death." He added that he ran out of funds. “We spent our money, we didn't have to scale up as we now need to,” he said. The U.N. needs $300 million just to see the crisis through the next two months.