(Bloomberg) -- A hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa region is intensifying, with the lives of hundreds of thousands of children increasingly at risk, the United Nations, aid agencies and government officials have warned. 

More than 1.7 million children in parts of Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya urgently need treatment for acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF. In Somalia alone, about 7.1 million people -- almost half the population -- will confront crisis-level food insecurity or worse until at least September and 213,000 of them face catastrophic hunger and starvation, according to the Famine Early Warning Network and the Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. 

The crisis was sparked by four consecutive rainy seasons failing within the space of two years, and weather forecasts suggest water shortages won’t abate before year-end at the earliest. Thousands of farmers have lost their crops and animals, and rural communities are being torn apart as families migrate in search of food and grazing.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also disrupted supply chains and sent prices of wheat, cooking oil and other staples soaring, worsening the situation. The two nations supplied more than 40% of Africa’s grain prior to the conflict.

“If the world does not widen its gaze from the war in Ukraine and act immediately, an explosion of child deaths is about to happen in the Horn of Africa,” Rania Dagash, Unicef’s deputy regional director for the region, told reporters in Geneva this week.

Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud sounded the alarm bells about his nation’s deepening famine in an address delivered ahead of his inauguration this week and called for international aid to be ramped up.

The drought is “the result of climate change, which is beyond our control,” he said. “People are in desperate need.”

Unicef estimates that 386,000 children in Somalia risk dying from malnutrition and need treatment. The country’s farmers have lost about 3 million head of livestock since mid-2021 due to drought, and the decline in meat and milk production has exacerbated hunger, particularly among young children in pastoral areas who depend on local supply, according to the UN. 

Aid agencies collectively reached 2.8 million people in Somalia in the first four months of this year, but the “scale of assistance currently being delivered and funding from the international community is not yet sufficient to protect those most at risk,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or Ocha, said in a June 6 statement. 

In Ethiopia, more than 7.2 million people require food aid, while 4.4 million need assistance to access water, according to Ocha. Almost 2.1 million head of livestock have died in the country, while at least 22 million more are at risk, it said in a June 2 report.   

Médecins Sans Frontières highlighted the extent of an unfolding disaster in the drought-stricken Afar region, with its staff witnessing “alarming indications of a deadly and escalating nutritional crisis.” The area has seen an influx of people displaced by a 19-month war between federal troops and forces loyal to the government of the northern Tigray region.

“What scares us most at this point is that we are only beginning to see the very tip of the iceberg, and already it is overwhelming,” said Raphael Veicht, the non-profit’s emergency coordinator in Ethiopia.

Ocha also estimates that more than 2.9 million people urgently need food aid in Kenya and some 650,000 children are acutely malnourished. More than 1.5 million head of livestock have died, and in some areas more then 90% of the open water sources had dried up, it said.

Kenya’s government has waived the duty on some corn imports to cushion consumers against rising food prices, while Ethiopia has cut value-added tax on sugar oil. There ability to provide further assistance is limited, because their finances are still recovering from the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. 

The Horn of Africa isn’t the only part of the continent where people don’t have enough to eat, with the UN World Food Program warning last week that 43 million people across the western region are at risk of food insecurity. 

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