GENEVA (Reuters) - One million more people in Somalia could face crisis levels of hunger in coming months due to a forecast drought during the next crop cycle, the World Food Programme said on Tuesday.
The number could rise even further because of funding cuts, Jean-Martin Bauer, director of the WFP's Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Service said.
In 2022, the Horn of Africa faced the driest conditions in more than four decades after consecutive rainy season failures, killing as many as 43,000 people, according to one study.
"A recent report estimated that about 3.4 million people are currently facing acute food insecurity in Somalia. That's going to rise to about 4.4 million in the next few months," said Bauer, referring to phase three and above in the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system.
Phase three is defined as crisis levels of hunger while phase four is deemed an emergency and phase five counts as a catastrophe or famine.
He said that below-average rains are forecast between April and June 2025, which could create drought conditions after two failed seasons.
Hunger tends to hit children hardest and based on current projections, some 1.7 million children under the age of five are expected to face acute malnutrition through December 2025, WFP said in a statement. Of those, 466,000 face severe acute malnutrition, it added.
Already, the WFP has had to cut back its assistance programmes and is helping some 820,000 people in the country versus 2.2 million people during a peak period in 2022, said Bauer.
Any funding cuts from the United States as part of an unprecedented aid retrenchment under President Donald Trump have not been factored in, he added in response to journalists' questions.
"So the situation could get worse for both of those reasons: the weather forecast, the funding cuts and in addition to everything that's going on in Somalia, which includes relatively high food prices and also conflict," he said.
(Reporting by Emma Farge and Cecile Mantovani; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
