UN chief warns of 25% spike in aid funding as famine looms

UN Under-Secretary General for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths attends a press conference in Geneva on December 1, 2021. The United Nations had appealed for $41 billion to provide life-saving assistance for 2022, and is due to launch its appeal for 2023 on Thursday.

UN aid chief Martin Griffiths said it was going to go up by 25 percent and that's a shocker. The gap between funding and needs is going to grow every year, and it's gone up about 25 percent in the past few years. He said that in 2022 the United Nations had only received about 44 percent of the money needed, and that in years gone by, we've seen 60 -- 65 percent as a norm. Griffiths said that funding and needs were growing because of the knock-on effects of the last couple of years from events such as the conflict in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises, like a spike in cholera outbreaks.

In 2023 he predicted that the gap would be bigger, and frankly we are going to fail, in many countries, the high number of people we serve and we serve roughly a population that is equivalent to about the third-most populous nation in the world. Griffiths said that it's a staggering and somewhat ludicrous responsibility.

READ MORE: Aid agencies call for urgent relief against famine in the Horn of Africa

In Somalia, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification IPC - used by UN agencies and aid groups to determine food insecurity - projected a famine in two districts in Somalia in September. Griffiths said that he understands that a famine will not be declared in Somalia, but he warned that in Somalia and soon in Ethiopia, where the numbers will be much worse, people are already dying of hunger and starvation. In the past 11 years famine has been declared twice : in Somalia in 2011 and in parts of South Sudan in 2017.

Half of the people who died in Somalia died before the famine was declared, International Rescue Committee President David Miliband told the Reuters NEXT event. The IPC's phase 5 begins with a warning and rises to a declaration of famine in a region.

Abdirahman Abdishakur, Somalia's drought envoy, told the humanitarian community that the threshold for a famine had not yet been met, but they also told the government that a famine will be declared, maybe in a few months, if the rains fail again. For famine to be declared, at least 20 percent of the population must be suffering extreme food shortages, with 30 percent of children acutely malnourished and two out of every 10,000 dying due to malnutrition or disease.

If they have the data and they decide the threshold has been met then the Somali government is not against famine declaration, but the threshold must be met and it hasn't, Abdishakur said. There is no politics in this, it is just data.