UN: Some 3.2 million Somalis need urgent aid

About 3.2 million people, or 43 percent of population in insurgency-hit Somalia need urgent help to get them through a growing humanitarian and food security crisis, the United Nations' food agency said on Monday. Violence in the African country has killed more than 16,000 people since the start of 2007 and uprooted 1 million, with chaos helping fuel kidnappings and piracy off the coast. The widespread humanitarian crisis has hit 1.2 million people in rural areas and 2 million urban dwellers, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a report on its web site. Somalia has been hit by recurring humanitarian emergencies over the last 18 years and has rates of acute malnutrition which are well above emergency levels, the Rome-based FAO said. The macro-economic crisis with national currency devaluation and hyperinflation has worsened the situation in Somalia, the agency said. With cereals prices staying 450-780 percent above normal levels, the average cost of the urban poor's minimum survival expenditure basket has more than doubled in the last year, while purchasing power fell, the FAO said. "Already urban poor households are deeply indebted and becoming more impoverished, thus increasing their vulnerability to shocks and further crises," it said. At least 200,000 children under five years, or one out of six children there are acutely malnourished, of which 60,000 are estimated to be severely malnourished. "These numbers ... will have a devastating impact on the long term economic development of the country," FAO said.