Targets for Somalia aid likely to be missed in 2011, U.N. draft report says

"Despite a massive increase in humanitarian operations and international funding since famine was formally declared 100 days ago, the relief effort in Somalia is expected to miss almost all its key targets for 2011, a draft United Nations report reveals," the Guardian reports, adding, "[m]alnutrition rates have more than doubled, less than 60 percent of the 3.7 million people targeted have received monthly food assistance, and only 58 percent of a targeted 1.2 million people received critical non-food aid items."

"'Access and security have presented considerable challenges in famine affected southern Somalia, with the result that many of the targeted indicators have not been achieved,' says the report," according to the newspaper. While the "current U.N. appeal for Somalia is funded at 79 percent," fifteen times more people have been reached by cash or food vouchers, emergency livestock interventions, or emergency agriculture or fishing inputs in 2011 compared with the same period in 2010, which the draft report attributes to "the deepening of the crisis and the rise in international funding," the Guardian states. "The draft, which predicts famine will spread further by the end of 2011, also warns of a looming drop in international aid 'due to donor concerns about the ability of humanitarian actors to reach beneficiaries,'" according to the newspaper (Provost, 10/27).