Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. I'm John Bithry.

The term famine is a powerful one, and it's a word that's starting to be used again to describe

the terrible humanitarian situation in Somalia. The country is experiencing its most extreme drought

for 40 years. Add to that, the governments fight against the militant group Al Shabab

and the impact of the war in Ukraine on global food supplies, and their affairs of history

repeating itself in this East African nation of 17 million people. Here's Adam Abdul Mula,

a local UN official. Seven point eight million people in Somalia are impacted by the drought,

and out of those 6.2 million are deemed food insecure. They need food assistance urgently.

Among those are 1.8 million children below the age of five who are suffering from malnutrition,

and among those 650,000 suffer from severe malnutrition and may not be able to make it by the

end of 2022. But the desperate situation is not officially being called a famine or not yet anyway.

So why is that? Well, for nearly 20 years there's been an internationally recognised scale

for measuring food shortages. It's decided by a part of the UN called the Integrated Food

Security Phase Classification, also known as the IPC. Jose Lopez is its global programme manager.

So with the acute food insecurity scale, we classify populations and geographical areas into

five different phases. The famine classification is the highest phase of the acute food insecurity

scale, and that's when at least 20% of households in a given area face an extreme lack of food.

That's when at least 30% of under-fired children are suffering from global acute malnutrition,

and when the mortality rate is about either two persons dying every day for every 10,000 people

or four children dying every day for every 10,000 children. And that's due to either

outright starvation or due to the interaction of malnutrition and diseases.

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