11 June ” 2022″ https://www.Nytimes.com/
The worst drought in four decades, and a sharp rise in food prices caused by the war in Ukraine, have left almost half of Somalia’s people facing acute food shortages.
DOOLOW, Somalia — When her crops failed and her parched goats died, Hirsiyo Mohamed left her home in southwestern Somalia, carrying and coaxing three of her eight children on the long walk across a bare and dusty landscape in temperatures as high as 100 degrees.
Along the way, her 3-and-a-half-year-old son, Adan, tugged at her robe, begging for food and water. But there was none to give, she said. “We buried him, and kept walking.”
They reached an aid camp in the town of Doolow after four days, but her malnourished 8-year-old daughter, Habiba, soon contracted whooping cough and died, she said. Sitting in her makeshift tent last month, holding her 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Maryam, in her lap, she said, “This drought has finished us.”
The worst drought in four decades is imperiling lives across the Horn of Africa, with up to 20 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia facing the risk of starvation by the end of this year, according to the World Food Program.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is exacerbating the situation, cutting off most of the wheat imports that Somalia depends on, and sharply increasing the prices of fuel, food and fertilizer.
The threat of hunger across Africa is so dire that last week, the head of the African Union, President Macky Sall of Senegal, appealed to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to lift the blockade on exports of Ukrainian grain and fertilizer — even as American diplomats warned of Russian efforts to sell stolen Ukrainian wheat to African nations.
The most devastating crisis is unfolding in Somalia, where about seven million of the country’s estimated 16 million people face acute food shortages. Since January, at least 448 children have died from severe acute malnutrition, according to a database managed by UNICEF.
Aid donors, focused on the crisis in Ukraine and the coronavirus pandemic, have pledged only about 18 percent of the $1.46 billion needed for Somalia, according to the United Nations’ financial tracking service. “This will put the world in a moral and ethical dilemma,” said El-Khidir Daloum, the Somalia country director for the World Food Program, a U.N. agency.
With the rivers low, wells dry and their livestock dead, families are walking or getting on buses and donkeys — sometimes for hundreds of miles — just to find food, water or emergency medical care.
Parents flow into the capital, Mogadishu, bringing their malnourished children to health facilities like Benadir Hospital, one of few in the country with a pediatric stabilization unit. The beds on a recent visit were packed with bony babies with scaly skin and hair that had lost its natural color because of malnutrition. Many of the children were also sick with illnesses like measles, and were being fed through nasal tubes and needed oxygen to breathe.
Fatuma Yusuf, a severely malnourished child, was being taken care of last month at the stabilization center at the Benadir Hospital in Mogadishu.
Mothers sat in the corridors, slowly feeding their children the peanut-based paste used to fight malnutrition. The price of this lifesaving product is projected to increase by up to 16 percent because of the war in Ukraine and the pandemic, which made ingredients, packaging and supply chains more costly, according to UNICEF.
At the hospital’s cholera treatment unit, Adan Diyad held the hand of his 4-year-old son, Zakariya, as the boy’s protruding ribs heaved. Mr. Diyad had abandoned his maize and bean fields in the southwestern region of Bay after the river ran low.
In Mogadishu, he settled at a crowded camp for displaced people with his wife and three children, where they had no toilet and not enough clean water. Without a job, he could not feed his family. Zakariya, usually chirpy, grew emaciated. The night before Mr. Diyad carried him into the hospital, he said he kept listening to his son’s heartbeat to make sure that he had not died.
“He couldn’t even open his eyes when I brought him here,” Mr. Diyad said.
Mr. Diyad and his family are among the 560,000 people displaced by the drought this year. As many as three million Somalis have also been displaced by tribal and political conflicts and the ever-growing threat from the terrorist group Al Shabab.
In rural areas across south and central Somalia, danger and poor road networks have made it hard for authorities or aid agencies to reach those in need. The United Nations estimates that almost 900,000 Somalis live in inaccessible areas controlled by the Shabab — though aid workers believe those figures are higher.
Mohammed Ali Hussein, the deputy governor of the southern Gedo region, acknowledged that local authorities were often unable to venture out of areas they control to rescue those in need, even when they received a distress call.
