More than 256,000 people in Djibouti - about 25 per cent of the population - are staring down crisis or emergency-level hunger over the coming months, according to a new report from the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) index. That's a sharp spike from the previous May-to-June period, because apparently things weren't dire enough.

“Urgent actions are more than necessary to reduce consumption deficits and vulnerability,” the report states, in the kind of understatement that makes you wonder if they've ever met a hungry person. Most of the affected are refugees in the Ali Addeh and Holl-Holl camps, where nearly 70 per cent of the 21,000-plus residents are already at crisis level or above, largely dependent on food assistance that the report says is “generally insufficient.”

The Horn of Africa nation of one million people faces multiple challenges - because one crisis is boring - with the report citing three main contributors to the hunger spike over the next six months. The IPC, created after the devastating 2004 Somalia famine to standardize hunger measurement, is basically sending up a flare: please prevent widespread starvation. Again.