Tuesday April 11, 2017
Women and children wait to be registered prior to a food distribution carried out by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Thonyor, Leer state, South Sudan, February 25, 2017.
The risk of mass starvation in four countries - northeast Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen - is rapidly rising due to drought and conflict, the U.N. refugee agency said on Tuesday.
"We are raising our alarm level today that the risk of mass deaths from starvation among populations in the Horn of Africa, Yemen and Nigeria is growing," UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards told a news briefing.
"We are already seeing a rise of displacement."
Amid a funding shortfall and sharply deteriorating availability of food, a humanitarian crisis possibly worse than that of 2011 when 260,000 people died of famine in the Horn of Africa "is fast becoming an inevitability", he said.