Visibly shocked by the suffering of malnourished Somalis and cholera victims during an emergency visit, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is urging international support to alleviate Somalia's severe hunger crisis.
"Every single person we have seen is a personal story of tremendous suffering. There is no way to describe it," Guterres said on Tuesday after seeing skeletal men, women and children in a cholera ward in Baidoa, 243 kilometres northwest of the capital, Mogadishu.
Somalia's prolonged drought has caused widespread hunger, and the shortage of clean water has resulted in cholera.
On his first field trip since becoming the UN chief, Guterres said Somalia's famine crisis requires a massive response.
"People are dying. The world must act now to stop this," he tweeted on his arrival in this Horn of Africa nation.
Guterres also visited a camp with hundreds of families displaced by the drought and Somalia's battle against the Islamic extremists of al-Shabaab.
"I have nothing. This is not a shelter, we barely get any food here and we have no protection. It's not safe, I am suffering," said Deira Mohamed Nor, with her 10-month-old baby girl Dahiro Ishaak Hussein, who is sick with malaria. Nor said she recently lost one of her children to diarrhoea.
Somalia is part of a massive $US4 billion ($A5.3 billion) aid appeal launched last month for four nations suffering from conflict and hunger.
The others are Nigeria, Yemen and South Sudan, where famine already has been declared in two counties.
Somalia over the weekend announced its first death toll since declaring a national disaster last week, saying 110 people had died in a 48-hour period in a single region.
Meeting the UN chief, Somalia's President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed said: "My first priority is to address this drought crisis, and my main priority is to make an appeal to the international community to help us."
