Famine in Africa: Almost unnoticed, over 300,000 children face death by starvation in Somalia

Sitting in the sand by the side of an empty road, Hamdi Mohammed gestured to the shack of wooden sticks and torn-up old clothes she calls home. Just a few months ago, she belonged to a prosperous family that owned nearly 100 head of cattle.

Now she has nothing. The driest conditions to hit the Horn of Africa in four decades killed Hamdi’s animals and uprooted her young family, forcing them to make their way on foot to this camp on the edge of Luglow, a dusty, desert-blown town in Somalia’s southern Jubaland state. The journey took four days.

Hundreds of ramshackle settlements like this have sprung up across Somalia in recent months to house the 670,000 people who have lost everything to the drought. Hamdi came here in search of food and water for her two children — aged two and three years old — but deliveries of aid have been sporadic.

 “I’m worried for my kids,” said Hamdi, 28. “There is nothing to eat and they are always hungry. When we get food, it is usually just salty rice. Life is very hard. We are living under the scorching sun with no support.”

While the international community scrambles to respond to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, a humanitarian crisis of vast proportions is taking hold of east Africa almost unnoticed. Three failed rainy reasons in a row have devastated livelihoods, affecting at least 7.2 million people in Ethiopia and wiping out 70 per cent of crops in neighbouring Kenya.

The impact is most keenly felt in Somalia, a country wracked by an Islamist insurgency group that has rendered much of its territory ungovernable. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) warns that 330,000 children in Somalia could die from starvation “by the middle of this year”, but there is not enough money to help them.

Aid has been slow to arrive. The UN has appealed for $1.46 billion (£1.14 billion) to fund its operations in Somalia, but has received just 4 per cent of that amount. As a result, it is struggling to give cash and food to those who need it.

“Essentially, we are taking from the hungry to feed the starving, and the hunger is increasing at a terrifying rate,” said Petroc Wilton, a spokesman for the WFP, who added that 40 per cent of Somalia’s population, which is estimated at almost 17 million, were facing “crisis levels of food insecurity or worse”.

The phrase describes people “marching towards starvation”, in the words of David Beasley, the head of the WFP. The start of the rainy season in April was supposed to bring some relief, but rainfall has been patchy, leaving Somalia facing the prospect of a fourth failed harvest.

 “We really need to hope the rains come, so people can plant things and livestock will have grass to eat,” said Richard Crothers, the head for Somalia of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). “If that doesn’t happen there is no question that we will be in full-blown famine soon.”

Crothers describes the scale of the crisis as “staggering”. He said: “Right now we are shifting our focus from preventing malnutrition to simply saving lives. One consequence is that we will have a much bigger humanitarian disaster in the long term.”

The war in Ukraine is complicating efforts to respond, by distracting donors’ attention and causing food prices to soar. Somalia gets 100 per cent of its wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine, and several shipments of grain have been cancelled. The country produces no significant wheat harvest of its own.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people affected by the drought are living in areas cut off by the Islamist al-Shabaab group. It operates checkpoints just six miles from Luglow, and the road linking the camp there to the nearest big town, Kismayo, is dotted with the charred remains of car bombs detonated by the militants. Humanitarian workers say al-Shabaab has not been willing to work with them to allow aid into their territory.

 “During the last drought in 2017, they showed some flexibility and there was collaboration,” said Crothers. “This time there is no access.”

Somalia is also in the grip of a political crisis that broke out in February 2021 when the president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, postponed elections and pushed legislation through parliament to extend his term.

Competition between him and his prime minister led to running gun battles on the streets of the capital, Mogadishu, last year, and donors including the International Monetary Fund have threatened to withhold funding if things are not resolved.

Humanitarian workers fear a repeat of the famine that struck the country 11 years ago, killing roughly 250,000 people.

Many of the factors that combined during the 2011 famine are at play in Somalia today: entrenched insecurity, poor governance and fatigue from international donors fed up with a venal political class.

 “Already we are at a kind of point of no return,” said Crothers. “Livestock herds are depleted, crops have been decimated. We have no idea how bad this is going to get, but if there is no change in funding, we are going to see people dying for a long time to come.”