Barbara Plett-Usher
speaker
155 appearances
9 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 8 Sep
Barbara Plett-Usher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
about ten years ago and this is also happening at a time of course when there are threats to maritime shipping, not just in the Gulf of Aden, but also especially in the Strait of Hormuz as well, uh threats to the possibility of security in the Red Sea, which empties into the Gulf.
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So it means that you have um quite an unstable situation.
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Well the surge in Somali piracy uh is partly because of domestic issues.
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So you've got um uh according to reports, fishermen who are angry at international trawlers, illegal trawlers that are decimating the fishing industry and so they have taken to piracy again to get money, basically.
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But uh there is some defense analysts that suspect that perhaps Houthi
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rebels are coordinating with the Somali pirates.
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There was one report of that a couple of weeks ago that there had been some coordination.
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It wasn't clear why and how that ended up, but what everybody's thinking about, of course, is that Iran has threatened to ask its Houthi allies in Yemen to block shipping in the Red Sea, which flows into the Gulf of Aden, because of the threats around the Strait of Hormuz.
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Iran had also
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wanted to take control of the Strait of Hormuz.
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The US has blocked shipping there, and so um there's been some question about whether that would also happen in the Red Sea.
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And also I would say there's just more traffic around Somalia at the moment because of the of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the problems and threats in the Red Sea.
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There's more traffic in the Indian Ocean which is just out of the Gulf of Aden, so you have more access to shipping.
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Our Africa correspondent, Barbara Pletasha, is monitoring the crisis in Somalia from neighbouring Kenya. This is due largely to drought, but then exacerbated by the ongoing conflict. So the UN is saying in the first three months of the year, half a million people were displaced, the vast majority of them by drought and the vast majority of them women and children. And so
This has caused a decrease in the amount of food available. They've seen this influx of malnourished children in the hospitals have had to expand their bed capacity as much as they could. So then they wanted to see the situation in the community and did this survey in various displacement sites in which they found one in every two children were acutely malnourished and one in every four severely malnourished. And one of the things they talked about was this was a new normal for
where mothers were hoping their child would be sick enough to get admitted into hospital and stay, which is not the usual want. But that's because there wasn't enough food or water back in the community to help the kids. And some 60% of them do get readmitted to either hospital or health programs when they are released. So that's a vicious cycle. And so they compared this to a severe drought in 2022, in which 2.6 million people died.
Children, I should say, had to be treated. But at that time, there was just so much more money to deal with it. $2.2 billion available in 2022. Now it's only $300 million, he said, and that's because the US, UK and the UN have severely cut their humanitarian funding. Yes, that was one of President Trump's first acts when he came to power, cutting USAID. And there are also allegations that the US is carrying out strikes on Somalia, too.
The press conference this morning with MSF was speaking mostly about the humanitarian situation, and it said that the conflict was contributing to it, in that you couldn't get out and help people in the rural areas who really needed help, but that, by and large, the drought was very much a motivating factor. They did say that the U.S. was one of the major donors to Somalia, $70 million to Somalia in different forms for different things last year, including health, and this year,
Nothing, they said. The UK has also cut around 50% of the funding. It's humanitarian funding. And this is a question not just of being able to deal with malnutrition and getting children to survive, but they are in a weaker condition because of the food shortage. And so they're more susceptible to disease. Plus, there's vaccination shortages.
One woman was described as seeing three of her four children die of measles in 24 hours. So the MSF and other humanitarians are calling for not just funding to help deal with this malnutrition crisis, but broader than that to deal with food supplies, livelihoods, medical campaigns and so on. Realistically, though, do you think their calls are going to be heeded?
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