Mogadishu, September 6 (BNA): The United Nations said that “famine is at the door” in Somalia, with “concrete indications” that famine will occur later this year in the southern Gulf region. This falls short of an official declaration of famine as thousands die in a historic drought exacerbated by the effects of the war in Ukraine.
UN Humanitarian Coordinator Martin Griffiths told reporters that he had been “heartbroken over the past few days” during a visit to Somalia where he saw starving children too weak to cry. More than 850,000 people are in the affected areas, the Associated Press reports, with tens of thousands arriving in the coming months, according to UN experts.
Official declaration of famine is rare and a warning that a little help is coming too late. At least one million people in Somalia have been displaced by the driest drought in decades, due to climate change, which is also affecting the broader Horn of Africa including Ethiopia and Kenya.
Famine is the severe shortage of food and the high death rate from direct starvation or malnutrition accompanied by diseases such as cholera. The announcement means that data shows that more than a fifth of families have severe nutritional gaps, more than 30% of children are severely malnourished and more than two people in 10,000 die every day.
The Ukraine war has been described as a disaster for Somalia, which has suffered from a shortage of humanitarian aid as international donors focus on Europe. Somalia got at least 90% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine before the war and has been hit hard by wheat scarcity and soaring food prices.
“Ukraine occupied the narrative,” Griffiths said.
Starving families in Somalia have been dazed for days or weeks across the dry terrain in search of help. Several family members are buried along the way. Even when they reach camps outside urban areas, they find little or no help.
Camps like theirs are surrounded by death, much to the cry of aid workers. “I couldn’t get out of my head from the little hills that mark the graves of children,” UNICEF Deputy Regional Director Rania Dagash said last week. “I’m from this area and I’ve never seen it this bad before.”
The official declaration of famine may bring much-needed funding. But the UN World Food Program said that “tragically, by the time famine was declared, it was already too late”.
When famine was declared in parts of Somalia in 2011, the deaths of a quarter of a million people were in full swing.
“This is not a repeat of the 2011 famine,” the UN humanitarian agency said last week. “It’s much worse.” She added that at least 730 children have died in feeding centers across Somalia, and more than 213,000 people are “at imminent risk” of death.
Samantha Power, Administrator of the US Agency for International Development, said last week that aid funding is down more than 60% from the response to the previous drought in Somalia in 2017, noting a “degree of desperation and devastation” not seen before in her career.
The Horn of Africa experienced four consecutive failed rainy seasons for the first time in more than half a century, endangering an estimated 20 million people in one of the world’s poorest and most unstable regions.
“Unfortunately, our models show with a high degree of confidence that we are entering the fifth consecutive season of failed rains,” said Glacier Artan, director of the Regional Center for Climate Prediction. “In Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, we are on the brink of an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.”
Artan said rainfall in the failed March-May season was the lowest in the past six decades. The next season from March to May also does not look good, he said, expressing concern that “this could be the seven-year drought, the book drought.”
Official declarations of starvation are rare because it is often not possible to obtain data that meets the criteria. Governments can be wary of associating with a term of such dismal magnitude. However, the recently elected Somali president appointed an envoy to combat drought in one of his first acts, which Griffiths described as “impressive”.
Due to the remote nature of the drought in Somalia, and with some hard-hit areas under the control of the extremist group Al-Shabab that has been hostile to humanitarian efforts, no one knows how many people have died or will be missing out in the coming months.
MI