Drought pushes Somalia to the verge of famine

Soaring food prices across the world – made worse by the war in Ukraine – and three failed consecutive rainy seasons have forced thousands across Somalia and in the Horn of Africa to leave everything behind in search of food and water. Families cannot cope with higher food prices, their livestock are dying off, and their incomes are drying up. They have nowhere left to turn.Somalia faces catastrophic hunger, with the country devastated by the extreme and worsening drought in the Horn of Africa.A total of 7.1mn people face acute food insecurity amid the driest conditions in 40 years, following three consecutive failed rainy seasons, according to the World Food Programme. Drought is compounding the impacts of other recurrent climate shocks, persistent insecurity and instability. A total of 1.5mn children under five face acute malnutrition; 386,000 of these face severe malnutrition and may be at risk of dying without immediate treatment. More than a million people have been displaced by the drought, 750,000 of whom this year only.Famine could break out in a matter of days in some regions if livestock and crops continue to die and soaring prices continue to destroy purchasing power. The last famine declared in Somalia, in 2011, killed a quarter of a million people. The UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said the latest UN food insecurity analysis found “concrete indications” that famine would occur in the Baidoa and Burhakaba districts of south-central Somalia between October and December unless aid efforts were significantly stepped up.“Famine is at the door and today we are receiving a final warning,” Griffiths, the UN’s under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said in Mogadishu.Somalia has been pushed to the brink by the unprecedented failure of four consecutive rainy seasons, which has forced several hundred thousand people from their homes and placed huge pressure on a country already weakened by decades of conflict.Though commonly used to describe extreme hunger, the term famine is used only rarely by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC’s) food security experts, who define it as an extreme deprivation of food where “starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition are or will likely be evident”, reported The Guardian newspaper. For a famine to be declared, an area will have at least 20% of households facing an extreme lack of food and 30% of children suffering from acute malnutrition, it said.Two people for every 10,000 of the population will die each day “due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease”.Somalia sourced 90% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine before the war. The first major shipment of Ukrainian grain since negotiations eased a Russian blockade reached East Africa a few weeks ago. But the damage done to a region so dependent on these imports has been deep and lasting.Foreign aid has been slow to come. A $1.5bn response plan for Somalia proposed by the United Nations was only 17% funded in April, and just two-thirds funded by August.Somalia needs urgent help and the time to act is now!