© Reuters / Kabir DhanjiA newly arrived Somali refugee carries her child as they await medical examinations at the Dadaab refugee camp, near the Kenya-Somalia border, July 23, 2011.
Desperate Somali mothers are abandoning their dying children by the roadside as they travel to overwhelmed emergency food centers in drought-hit eastern Africa, U.N. aid officials said Monday.
Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, told a conference in Rome that a combination of natural disaster and regional conflict was affecting more than 12 million people.
"We are seeing all the points able to distribute food completely overwhelmed," she said, adding that a camp in Dadaab in Kenya that was built for 90,000 people now housed 400,000.
"We want to make sure the supplies are there along the road because some of them are becoming roads of death where mothers are having to abandon their children who are too weak to make it or who have died along the way," she said.
Women and children were among the most at risk in the crisis, Sheeran said, calling it the "children's famine" given the number of children at risk of death or permanent stunting of their brains and bodies due to hunger.
The WFP will feed 2.5 million malnourished children and is trying to raise money for more, she said.
Horrible Choice
"I believe it is the children's famine, because the ones who are the weakest are the children and those are the ones we're seeing are the least likely to make it," Sheeran told Reuters.
"We've heard of women making the horrible choice of leaving behind their weaker children to save the stronger ones or having children die in their arms."
Ministers and senior officials met at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome Monday to discuss how to mobilize aid following the worst drought in decades in a region stretching from Somalia to Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti.
The WFP said it needed an extra $360 million in urgent funds. Oxfam said that overall another $1 billion was needed to handle the situation.
The World Bank said in a statement it was providing more than $500 million to assist drought victims, in addition to $12 million in immediate aid to help those worst hit.
Amid warnings that urgent action was required to stop a humanitarian disaster spreading across the Horn of Africa, officials said there was still a chance to support people and help them resume livelihoods as farmers, fishers and herders.
Governments worldwide and the U.N. have been criticized for their slow response to the severe drought but they face severe problems getting aid to a region in the grip of a raging conflict across much of southern Somalia.
The U.N. has declared a famine in two regions of Somalia and warned it could spread further afield.
Years of anarchic conflict in southern Somalia have exacerbated the emergency, preventing aid agencies from helping communities in the area. Nearly 135,000 Somalis have fled since January, mainly to neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia.
The WFP has said it cannot reach more than 2 million Somalis facing starvation in areas controlled by Islamist militants, who imposed a food aid ban in 2010 and have regularly threatened relief groups.
Oxfam's Barbara Stocking said it was very difficult for staff to access parts of Somalia but it was working with local partners to provide aid and they were trying to help them scale up their support in the current crisis.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in the United Nations on 10 December, 1948.
Article 25 states:
"(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
"(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection."
We have had over 50 years to make this happen and we have failed. Was the whole idea just PR? A lot of hot air from a bunch of diplomats trying to look good? It appears so.
I think it is obvious that there is something on this planet, perhaps even built into the human psyche, that violently disagrees with the basic principles of human rights. It isn't just intractable on the subject. It is in violent, open disagreement with it. This thing, whatever it is, is our true enemy. If we want to have any chance of surviving as a civilization on this earth or anywhere else, we must understand this thing, attack it, and defeat it.
A few have told us that they know how to do this. Our futures are resting on their ability to convince us that they are right and to join them.
Meanwhile we must do our utmost to support people of good faith and their groups. They are putting out to somehow reduce the worst suffering while the rest of us work to keep things going. These tragedies could happen to anyone and are. When your house and town is flooded or knocked down by a storm or cut off from sources of the basics for life by conflict or disaster, wouldn't you like to think that there are people out there at least trying to get help to you?