“Famine is knocking at the door”. Somalia is on the brink of famine, the head of the UN humanitarian agency warned Monday, September 5, in a “final warning” before a disaster in this country in the Horn of Africa plagued by a historic drought. The latest data available “show concrete indications that a famine will occur (…) between October and December of this year” in two districts in the south of the country, those of Baidoa and Burhakaba, announced Martin Griffiths, the head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the United Nations (Ocha), during a press conference from the Somali capital Mogadishu.
Arriving in Somalia on Thursday, he said to himself “deeply shocked by the level of pain and suffering that so many Somalis are enduring”claiming to have seen “children so malnourished they could barely speak” during a visit to Baidoa, “epicenter” of impending disaster. Across the country, a total of 7.8 million people, nearly half of the population, are affected by a historic drought, of which 213,000 are in serious danger of starvation, according to UN figures.
Hunger and thirst have thrown a million people onto the roads since 2021. “Our worst fears for Somalia are now a reality: famine is imminent if funds do not arrive immediately”World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley said on Twitter, calling for an international wake-up call: “The world MUST act now.”
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Shaken for 15 years by the violent insurgency of radical Islamists Shebab, the country is currently experiencing its third drought in a decade, but the current “exceeded the horrific droughts of 2010-2011 and 2016-2017 in duration and severity”, Ocha estimated in July. This drought, which is raging throughout the Horn of Africa, is the result of an unprecedented sequence for at least 40 years of four insufficient rainy seasons since the end of 2020.