The worst hunger emergency in half a century is hitting Somalia and some of the world’s other poorest countries, where the effects of protracted conflict and increasingly extreme weather have been compounded by economic turmoil from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and coronavirus pandemic. The World Food Program says increases in food and fuel costs since March have pushed an additional 47 million people into acute food insecurity, when a person is no longer able to consume enough calories to sustain life and livelihoods. live, bringing the total to 345 million people worldwide. Of these, approximately 50 million live on the brink of starvation.
Madina Ibrahim said hunger had left her too weak to produce breast milk for her 10-day-old son, Ali, who was born while the family fled the drought.
In Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan, nearly 900,000 people are already facing starvation and death. That’s a more than 10-fold increase from 2019 – and, according to some estimates, could lead to more people dying of hunger in 2022 and 2023 than in any other year since the 1960s and China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward agricultural policies. Although world market prices for some foods, notably grains, have fallen in recent weeks, people who study supply chains warn that it may take months for those declines to filter through to hard-to-reach countries, too late for thousands of families who they are hungry now High fuel prices, meanwhile, continue to drive up the cost of everything from transporting food aid to trucking drinking water and, along with difficulties obtaining credit, are pushing local traders into bankruptcy. “The combination of factors we have now, which we see playing out more strongly in countries like Somalia, could be the harbinger of what’s to come on a larger scale,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the University’s World Peace Foundation Tufts. “And it’s predictable and preventable.” For his 2018 book, “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” he researched famine deaths since the late 1870s. Among the first victims of the current crisis was 2-month-old Muad Abdi, who died late last month after a night of diarrhea and vomiting in a sprawling camp on the outskirts of Mogadishu.
Hawa Abdi held her 1-year-old daughter as they stood by the grave of her infant son in the camp in Somalia.
“His eyes turned and I felt he was no longer with me,” said his mother, Hawa Abdi, looking down at the corrugated metal and sand that had piled up on her baby’s grave moments before a reporter and photographer from The Wall Street Journal visited the camp. Muad’s older brother, Abdirahman, 2, was battling an infection in an overcrowded hospital, his defenses weakened by severe malnutrition. His 1-year-old sister, Habiba, slumped limply on her mother’s hip. Until three months ago, Ms. Abdi said, the $1 to $2 a day her husband earned from casual construction work bought two meals of rice and beans for the family of six. Now this money is barely enough for a daily meal of rice. “Even the aid agencies said they don’t have enough to give us because of the war in Ukraine,” said Ms Abdi, whose family fled to the camp in 2020 at the start of a drought that forecasters say is the worst in the Somalia. four decades. Aid groups warn that Ukraine’s war is drawing attention and resources away from other crises, just as they face rising prices for goods needed to save lives. The cost of food that WFP provides for its aid programs has increased by 46% compared to 2019, due to sharp increases in the prices of vegetable oils, special nutritional pastes needed to treat malnourished children and transport. Aid groups have reduced their rations and the number of people receiving aid.
A World Food Program storage facility in Mogadishu. Somalia is at the center of an accelerating global hunger emergency.
“We are taking food from the mouths of the hungry to feed the hungry,” said El-Khidir Daloum, WFP director for Somalia, a country of 16 million people where 7.1 million face acute food insecurity and 213,000 live in famine. as conditions. The United Nations Children’s Fund says severe malnutrition rates among Somali children under 5 are higher now than in 2011-12, when more than a quarter of a million Somalis died in the worst famine of the 21st century. In Ethiopia and Sudan, WFP last month cut food aid to 1.2 million refugees to half their daily nutritional needs, citing a combined funding gap of $529 million. These aid cuts and rising prices are hitting countries like Somalia very hard, which due to a dry climate and an insurgency led by the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group al-Shabaab produces less than 10% of its food needs. food even in a year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Domestic food production in the April-June harvest period was between 40% and 60% below its long-term average, the FAO estimates, while about three million head of livestock have been lost since mid-2021 as pastures have dried up. Weather models signal that the rains that usually fall between October and December will likely be below average this year, setting the stage for a fifth straight failed rainy season. In Mogadishu, the global food supply crisis is more of a demand crisis, with many Somalis unable to afford the goods they used to buy. Grain importers and market sellers say this dynamic has led to a catastrophic breakdown of a domestic supply chain built on credit and trust that could have long-term consequences for how millions of Somalis access food . At Mogadishu’s Ansaloti food market, only a few shoppers roamed the normally busy aisles and more than half the stalls were empty. “Most of the other vendors have gone out of business,” said Saido Ali, standing behind boxes of wilted spinach, bruised cherry tomatoes and small piles of spaghetti and linguine imported from Turkey.
Saido Ali, a shopkeeper at the Ansaloti food market in Mogadishu, said she is one of the few vendors still operating.
Food products in plastic bags in Ansaloti market.
A kilogram of pasta, a popular staple in Somalia, now costs $1.50, down from 70 cents a few months ago, Ms Ali said. Cooking oil that used to sell in 3 liter bottles is now packed in plastic bags less than a tenth of the size. Shoppers who used to pay for their purchases when they got their paychecks at the end of the month now have to pay on the spot. The month-to-month non-payment of these joint loans reverberates further in a supply chain already shaken by Russia’s blockade of grain at Black Sea ports and other countries’ export restrictions. Adam Abdullahi, a grain importer in Mogadishu, says about 60 percent of his competitors have gone bankrupt since 2020 as middlemen went bankrupt and demand plummeted. Instead of the 6,000 40-foot containers of wheat flour, rice, cooking oil and sugar he imports in a normal year, he said he is now on track to reach 2,000. The cost of renting and shipping a container from Asia, meanwhile, has jumped to $13,000 from $4,000, he said.
Tents made of sticks and pieces of cloth sheltered families in the camp on the outskirts of Mogadishu last month.
Arbo Ali kept her daughter, Halima, in the camp. The 25-year-old mother fled the drought with her children and gave birth to twins on the journey. Halima is malnourished and cannot breastfeed. her twin died two days after birth.
“If the drought and export restrictions persist, we will also leave,” Mr Abdullahi said. At the camp where little Mouad is buried, new families escaping the drought arrive daily, setting up igloo-shaped tents made of sticks and scraps of cloth. Among the latest arrivals were Arbo Ali and her six children. The youngest, 10-day-old Halima, lay limp in her mother’s arms.
A child is checked for malnutrition by a health worker at the camp.
Ms Ali, 25, said she gave birth to Halima and her twin sister, who died two days later, without help on the way from southern Somalia, where drought had killed the family’s 200 cattle. “I dug a hole and buried her,” said Ms Ali. “I didn’t get to name her.” Mrs Ali said she was worried about Halima, who had a fever and stopped breastfeeding. Beside her, her 2-year-old son, Abdirahman, was crying from hunger, licking sand from his hand. Mrs Ali said she had no idea where…
