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Al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group which controls large swathes of south and central Somalia, had imposed a ban on foreign aid agencies in its territories in 2009, but has recently allowed limited access. During Wednesday's House of Commons debate on the phone-hacking scandal, MPs called on News International to publish the full exchanges about e-mails examined by the legal firm. "If we don't act now, famine will spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months, due to poor harvests and infectious disease outbreaks," said the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Somalia, Mark Bowden. News International has said a May 2007 letter from the firm had made it believe that hacking was a "matter of the past" and confined to a single rogue reporter. Nearly half the Somali population - 3.7 million people - were in crisis, he said, with most of them in the south.