Nigeria May Be On Brink of Famine

Local Editor

Nigeria is in need of $164 million in humanitarian funding to prevent thousands of deaths from malnutrition in its war-torn northeast, a United Nations humanitarian coordinator said this week.

The ongoing conflict between Nigeria's military and the Boko Haram extremist group is to blame for the growing hunger crisis in the northeast, humanitarian officials said.

The seven-year-old war disrupted planting and marketplaces, killed more than 20,000 people and forced 2.7 million to flee in Nigeria and neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

"We've got as many as 250,000 children in the northeast of Nigeria who are severely acutely malnourished and we could lose up to 50,000 children before the end of the year if we don't scale up right now," Toby Lanzer, the UN's regional humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel, reported.

For his part, the northeast coordinator for Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency Muhammed Kanar said camps in the northeast set up to house people displaced by the Boko Haram conflict are swelling with new arrivals.

"The situation is getting overwhelming, because of the liberation of [displaced people] from local governments, liberated communities," Kanar said.

Lanzer said 4.4 million people in northeastern Nigeria are "severely food insecure," but the country doesn't have the resources to tackle this problem alone.

Relatively, the price of oil, Nigeria's top export, declined globally, and the country has been particularly hard-hit by militant attacks on its petroleum infrastructure that have dropped production from around two million barrels per-day to about 1.5 million barrels.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team