KEY HUMANITARIAN DEVELOPMENTS
• Successive seasons of near to above average rainfall in most parts of Somalia, low food prices and continued humanitarian response have brought down the number of people requiring urgent, life- saving humanitarian assistance from its peak of four million during the 2011 famine to an estimated 857,000.
• IDPs continue to constitute a majority (74%) of the 857,000 people in Crisis and Emergency. The challenge faced by IDPs includes reliance on marginal and often unreliable livelihood strategies and poor living and sanitary conditions.
• The Deyr 2013 cereal harvest in January/February was 20 percent below the long-term and five-year averages. This undermined the positive impact of increased livestock prices, increasing livestock herd sizes, improved milk availability, low prices of staple food commodities and sustained humani- tarian interventions.
• The food security condition of over 2 million additional people remains fragile. This group of house- holds may struggle to meet their own minimal food requirements through mid-2014, and they remain highly vulnerable to shocks that could push them back to food security crisis.
• Levels of acute malnutrition remain critical among rural populations in many parts of South-Central Somalia and among Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). An estimated 203,000 children under the age of five are acutely malnourished, 51,000 of whom are severely malnourished. A majority of the mal- nourished children are found among non-IDP populations of the South.