About 20 million people in Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen are on the brink of famine, with famine already declared in South Sudan.

This hunger crisis is being called the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. So why are we calling it a hunger crisis, instead of a famine?

And what exactly is a famine?

Defined by the dictionary as an extreme scarcity of food, the United Nations has three criteria that must be met for the term famine to be used.

• 20 percent of households face extreme food shortages
• Over 30 percent of the population are acutely malnourished
• Every day, hunger causes two out of every 10,000 people to die

How did we get here?

This crisis is largely human-made, according to UNICEF. The agency describes how it believes we got to this point:
“Scorched earth tactics by conflicting parties are destroying crops and critical infrastructure like health facilities. Heavy fighting is forcing farmers to abandon their fields, while blocking humanitarian access to people in desperate need of food aid and clean water.”

What can we do?

Feed My Starving Children partners with organizations and ministries around the world to get life-saving meals to the people who need them most.

But many of the countries hardest hit by drought and famine are also war-torn nations where food is nearly impossible to deliver.

FMSC’s efforts for this crisis are currently being directed to Somalia.

Our hearts break for the children and families in Yemen and Nigeria, but we currently don’t have any existing partnerships in these regions. We pray for these countries daily.

We do have a history of distributing food through several different partners in South Sudan, but due to the violent conflict, our partners have not been able to send FMSC meals in the last year.

Many feeding programs in South Sudan have been suspended because the beneficiaries and staff have fled the country and are now living as refugees.

You can help millions of children

We need at least 6,000 additional volunteers each month to meet the number of meals being requested by our partners in this crisis, and in the continuing recovery of Southwest Haiti after Hurricane Matthew.

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