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As famine looms in parts of Africa, the World Food Security has called on governments, civic groups and businesses to rally support for immediate relief to people in risk- prone countries and develop longer-term initiatives that will allow them to recover and restore their livelihoods. In a letter to the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) members and stakeholders, the Chair of the Committee on World Food Security, Ambassador Amira Gornass, urged stakeholders, as well as the international community at large, to step up their response to the crises in the countries. Report from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, state that famine has been declared in some counties of South Sudan, and the number of people close to sliding from emergency to disaster is terrifyingly high in North-Eastern Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen. According to the FAO, 30 million people in the four countries are uncertain where their next meal will come from or are reliant on humanitarian assistance. In a similar vein, the United Nations has warned that hundreds of Nigerians could starve to death in the famine threatened north east due to lack of aid funds. Speaking to the Thomas Reuters Foundation in Dakar, the World Food Programme Regional Director, Abdou Dieng informed that almost half a million of the region’s hungriest people could miss out of food aid next month because the WFO did not have enough money to feed them. “We need $250 million to prevent famine in the coming months,” said the WFP’s regional director. “About 4.7 million people in northeast Nigeria – where the jihadist group Boko Haram has waged an eight-year insurgency – need food aid, a number expected to rise to 5.2 million by August, according to the WFP. Yet a shortfall in funding means the U.N. agency can only provide aid to 1.3 million of those most in need next month, instead of the 1.8 million people it had originally planned to reach, said Dieng. “If we don’t get the funding, hundreds of thousands of people could die of hunger,” he said, He also informed that hunger levels would increase as the rainy season restricted aid delivery and continuing insecurity limited the population’s ability to farm. According to the aid agencies, the northeast is on the brink of famine after two years of missed harvests, with a third missed year looking likely. Source