Feed My Starving Children plans massive aid shipment to Somalia

Somali famine
Women from southern Somalia holding babies stand in a line to receive aid at a refugee camp in Mogadishu, Somalia, Saturday, July 16, 2011. Thousands of people have arrived in Mogadishu over the past two weeks seeking assistance due to lack of water and food. The worst drought in the Horn of Africa has sparked a severe food crisis and high malnutrition rates.
Farah Abdi Warsameh/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A Twin Cities-based charity is pledging to deliver more emergency food aid to famine victims in the Horn of Africa.

Feed My Starving Children says it will ship nearly 1.4 million meals in the coming weeks, with most of the aid destined for Somalia.

And there's more where that comes from. The Christian faith-based charity has pledged to send 5 million meals to the region over the next seven months.

Tbe worst drought in 60 years in the Horn of Africa has prompted thousands of Somalis to flee their own country for help in neighboring northeastern Kenya. The United Nations officially declared a famine in two parts of Somalia, but an estimated 11 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya have been impacted by the drought.

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FMSC says that refugee camps along the Somali-Kenyan border are dangerously over-capacity. The Dadaab refugee camp complex is under particular strain.

And it's a situation complicated by the fact that the U.N. World Food Program considers Somalia the most dangerous country in the world.

Getting help to the region may sound like an insurmountable logistical challenge, but Feed My Starving Children has helped bring relief to some of the toughest places in the world, including Haiti after the January earthquake, CEO Mark Crea says.

His group is hardly alone. After two years of planning, the Minneapolis-based American Refugee Committee has a team working in Mogadishu, with the help of local leaders in the Twin Cities Somali community.