Food alarm rings in developing world

The situation in the famine-hit Horn of Africa is getting worse, with 12 million people suffering from hunger and more than 2,000 flooding into refuge camps near the Somalia-Kenya and Somalia-Ethiopia borders every day. According to the United Nations Food Programme, a child starves to death every 6 minutes in Somalia, which has been the hardest hit and has lost almost 6 percent of its population to starvation.

China has provided emergency food aid worth 90 million yuan ($14.07 million) to Ethiopa, Kenya and Djibouti, but UN agencies still face a fund gap of more than $300 million to meet the immediate needs of the hungry.

Though the famine or famine-like conditions in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti has been caused by the severest drought in almost 60 years, it reflects the vulnerability of the food situation in the developing world. If the crisis is not handled immediately and properly, the tragedy in the Horn of Africa will take the lives of tens of thousands of more people.