Growing risk of 'mass' starvation deaths in Africa: UN

Women arrive at a local health centre with their children to get food rations near Lokitaung in northern Kenya's Turkana county where a biting drought has ravaged livestock population on March 21, 2017. (AFP)

GENEVA:  The United Nations warned Tuesday that "the risk of mass deaths from starvation ... is growing" among people in conflict and drought-hit areas of the Horn of Africa, Yemen and Nigeria.

Due to drought and a "severe" funding shortfall "an avoidable humanitarian crisis ... is fast becoming an inevitability", added UN refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards, cautioning that the current crisis could be worse than the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa that killed 260,000 people.