20 mil­lion peo­ple in East Africa are in des­per­ate need of food aid accord­ing to the United Nations. Drought and war have been the biggest con­tribut­ing fac­tors to the hunger.

From Reuters, writer Sil­via Aloisi gives us the details of the UN report.

“The sit­u­a­tion is very wor­ry­ing due to expected crop and pas­ture fail­ures from poor rains in sev­eral areas, the increase in con­flicts, trade dis­rup­tions and con­tin­u­ing high food prices,” the U.N. Food and Agri­cul­ture Orga­ni­za­tion (FAO) said.

In its lat­est report on food and crop prospects (www.fao.org), FAO said delayed rains and dry spells often fol­lowed by floods had hurt crops and pas­tures in Kenya, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda.

In Soma­lia and Sudan, poor weather has wors­ened a food emer­gency due to civil wars, with 3.6 mil­lion and 5.9 mil­lion peo­ple in need of food aid, respec­tively. In the case of Soma­lia, that is about 50 per­cent of the total population.

The U.N. agency is host­ing a world food sum­mit in Rome next week, hop­ing to win broad sup­port for an increase in agri­cul­tural invest­ments in poor coun­tries to help them feed themselves.

Maize pro­duc­tion in Kenya, east Africa’s biggest econ­omy, is expected to be 30 per­cent down on last year. About 3.8 mil­lion Kenyans, mainly liv­ing in pas­toral and mar­ginal agri­cul­tural areas, are in need of emer­gency food assis­tance, FAO said.

That num­ber rises to 6.2 mil­lion peo­ple in Ethiopia, where late and erratic rains have dam­aged maize and sorghum crops and reduced avail­abil­ity of pas­tures in many parts of the country.