By Abdi Latif DahirPhotographs by Malin Fezehai
Sunday June 12, 2022
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.
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.
Extreme weather events, some linked to climate change, have
devastated communities, too, bringing flash floods, cyclones, rising
temperatures, a locust infestation that destroyed crops, and, now, four
consecutive failed rainy seasons.
“These crises just keep coming one after another,” so people
have not had a chance to rebuild their farms or herds, said Daniel Molla, the
chief technical adviser on food and nutrition for Somalia at the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization.
Those uprooted by the drought are arriving in towns and cities
where many are already straining to afford food.
Somalia imports over half of its food, and the poor in
Somalia already spend 60 to 80 percent of their income on food. The loss of
wheat from Ukraine, supply-chain delays and soaring inflation have led to sharp
rises in the prices of cooking oil and staples like rice and sorghum.
At a market in the border town of Doolow, more than two
dozen tables were abandoned because vendors could no longer afford to stock
produce from local farms. The remaining retailers sold paltry supplies of
cherry tomatoes, dried lemons and unripe bananas to the few customers trickling
in.
Some of the shoppers were displaced people with food
vouchers from aid groups, worried about the rising food prices.
Traders like Adan Mohamed, who manages a juice and snacks
shop, say they had to raise their prices after the costs of sugar, flour and
fruits soared. “Everything is expensive,” said Mr. Mohamed, blending pineapples
imported from Kenya. And with wages relatively unchanged, many Somalis said
they have cut back on meat and camel milk. Over three million herd animals have
perished since mid-2021, according to monitoring agencies.
The drought is also straining the social support systems
that Somalis depend on during crises.
As thousands of hungry and homeless people flooded the
capital, the women at the Hiil-Haween Cooperative sought ways to support them.
But faced with their own soaring bills, many of the women said they had little
to share. They collected clothes and food for about 70 displaced people.
“We had to reach deep into our community to find anything,”
said Hadiya Hassan, who leads the cooperative.
Experts forecast that the upcoming October to December rainy
season will most likely fail, pushing the drought into 2023. The predictions
are worrying analysts, who say the deteriorating conditions and the delayed
scale-up in funding could mirror the severe 2011 drought that killed about
260,000 Somalis.
“There are scary echoes of 2011,” said Daniel Maxwell, a
professor of food security at Tufts University who co-wrote the book “Famine in
Somalia.”
For now, the merciless drought is forcing some families to
make hard choices.
Back at the Benadir hospital in Mogadishu, Amina Abdullahi
gazed at her severely malnourished 3-month-old daughter, Fatuma Yusuf.
Clenching her fists and gasping for air, the baby let out a feeble cry, drawing
smiles from the doctors who were happy to hear her make any noise at all.
“She was as still as the dead when we brought her here,” Ms.
Abdullahi said. But even though the baby had gained more than a pound in the
hospital, she was still less than five pounds in all — not even half what she
should be. Doctors said it would be a while before she was discharged.
This pained Ms. Abdullahi. She had left six other children
behind in Beledweyne, about 200 miles away, on a small, desiccated farm with
her goats dying.
“The suffering back home is indescribable,” she said. “I
want to go back to my children.”
Abdi Latif Dahir is
the East Africa correspondent. He joined The Times in 2019 after covering East
Africa for Quartz for three years. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya. @Lattif
Malin Fezehai, a
visual reporter, has worked in more than 30 countries. Her photographic work
has the common denominator of displacement. @malinfezehai • Facebook