Scott Paul, the head of US government advocacy for Oxfam, said simply flooding the area with food was unlikely to solve the hunger crisis.
“In the north we are talking about a famine situation where putting food on someone’s doorstep, or dropping it from the sky or offloading from a pier could be dangerous. It’s not just minimally helpful, it could be dangerous to severely acutely malnourished people,” he said.
“The kind of humanitarian assistance needed to bring people back from a famine … [would involve] flooding the zone with people and medicine, and medical supplies. And that requires a kind of operating environment that we are nowhere close to having right now.”