Doolow, Somalia — When a crop fails and a dry goat dies, Hirshiyo Mohammed leaves a house in southwestern Somalia, carrying three out of eight children, and is 100 degrees hot, bare dust. I took a long walk to soothe the scenery.
Along the way, his three-and-a-half-year-old son, Adan, pulled a robe and begged for food and water. But she said she had nothing to give. “We buried him and kept walking.”
They arrived at an aid camp in the town of Doolow four days later, but her malnourished eight-year-old daughter, Haviba, soon suffered a whooping cough and died, she said. She said last month, she sat in a temporary tent, held her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Mariam on her lap, and said, “This drought ended us.”
The worst drought in 40 years is to threaten the Horn of Africa, where up to 20 million people live in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. Facing the risk of hunger By the end of this year, according to the World Food Program.
The threat of hunger across Africa is so dire that last week African Union leader Macky Sall told Russia President Vladimir V. Putin to block Ukrainian grain and fertilizer exports. I appealed to cancel. Diplomats warned of Russia’s efforts to sell stolen Ukrainian wheat to African countries.
The The most devastating crisis In Somalia, about 7 million of the country’s estimated 16 million people face serious food shortages. Since January, at least 448 children have died of severe acute malnutrition, according to a database maintained by UNICEF.
Aid donors focused on the Ukrainian crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, Only about 18 percent Of the $ 1.46 billion needed for Somalia, according to the United Nations Treasury Tracking Service. “This puts the world in a moral and ethical dilemma,” said El Kidil Daroum, Secretary of State for the World Food Program, a United Nations agency.
Due to the low rivers, dry wells and dead livestock, families are walking, taking buses and donkeys looking for food, water and emergency care.
Parents flow into the capital, Mogadishu, and take malnourished children to medical facilities such as Benadir Hospital, one of the few in the country with a pediatric stabilization unit. The beds on my recent visit were full of babies with scaly skin and hair bones that lost their natural color due to malnutrition. Many of the children also had measles-like illnesses, were nourished through the nasal canal, and needed oxygen to breathe.
The mother sat in the hallway and slowly gave the children the peanut-based paste used to combat malnutrition.The price of this lifesaving product is Expected to increase According to UNICEF, the war and pandemic in Ukraine have increased raw material, packaging and supply chain costs by up to 16%.
In the hospital’s cholera treatment unit, Adan Diyad grabbed the hand of his four-year-old son, Zachariah, and the boy’s protruding ribs were raised. Mr. Diyad abandoned the corn and bean fields in the southwestern part of the bay after the river stopped flowing.
In Mogadishu, he settled in a crowded camp for refugees with his wife and three children. There was no toilet and not enough clean water. Without a job, he couldn’t support his family. Zakariya is usually chewy and thin. The night before Mr. Diyad took him to the hospital, he said he kept listening to his son’s heartbeat to make sure he wasn’t dead.
“When I brought him here, he couldn’t even open his eyes,” said Mr. Diyad.
Mr. Diyad and his family are among 560,000 Evacuation due to drought this year. As many as 3 million Somali people have been expelled by tribal and political conflicts and the ever-increasing threat from the terrorist group al-Shabaab.
In rural areas of southern and central Somalia, dangerous and poor road networks make it difficult for authorities and aid agencies to reach out to those in need. The United Nations estimates that nearly 900,000 Somali people live in inaccessible areas controlled by Shabab, but aid workers believe those numbers are higher.
Mohammed Ali Hussein, Deputy Governor of the Southern Ged, may not be able to get out of the area they control and rescue people in need, even if they receive a distress signal. I admitted that there are many.
Extreme weather events associated with climate change have also devastated communities and brought flash floods. typhoonTemperature rise, crop-destroying locust epidemics, and now four consecutive rainy season failures.
“These crises continue to occur,” said Daniel Mora, Somalia’s chief technical advisor on food and nutrition at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, who did not have the opportunity to rebuild farms and herds.
People uprooted by the drought have arrived in towns and cities where many are already nervous to buy food.
Somalia imports more than half of its food, and the poor in Somalia are already spend Food accounts for 60 to 80 percent of their income. Due to wheat loss from Ukraine, supply chain delays and inflation surges Rapid price increase Of cooking oil and staples like rice and sorghum.
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At the market in the border town of Doolow, more than 20 tables were abandoned as vendors couldn’t afford to stock produce from local farms. The rest of the retailers sold small supplies of cherry tomatoes, dried lemons, and unripe bananas to a small number of incoming customers.
Some shoppers became refugees with food vouchers from aid groups, worried about rising food prices.
Traders like Adan Mohammed, who runs a juice and snack store, say they had to raise prices after soaring sugar, flour and fruit costs. “Everything is expensive,” Mohammed said, blending pineapples imported from Kenya. And wages remained relatively unchanged, he said, and many Somali people reduced meat and camel milk. A herd of over 3 million animals Dead After mid-2021, according to the monitoring agency.
Drought also puts a strain on the social support systems that Somalia relies on during a crisis.
When thousands of hungry homeless people flooded the capital, women in the Hiil-Haween co-operative sought ways to help them. But in the face of their own soaring bills, many women said they rarely share. They collected clothes and food for about 70 refugees.
“We had to reach deep into our community to find something,” said Hadiya Hassan, who heads the co-operative.
Experts say that the rainy season from October to December is the best Likely to fail, Pushing up drought in 2023. Predictions are worried about analysts. They say the worsening situation and delayed scale-up of funding may reflect the severe drought of 2011. Killed about 260,000 Somali people..
“There was a terrifying response in 2011,” said Daniel Maxwell, a professor of food security at Tufts University, who co-authored the book.Somali famine.. “
So far, the relentless drought has forced some families to make difficult choices.
Returning to Benadir Hospital in Mogadishu, Amina Abdullah stared at Fatuma Yusuf, a three-month-old daughter with severe malnutrition. Her baby clenched her fist, suffocated her, screamed faintly, and when she heard her make a noise, she pulled her smile out of the delighted doctor.
“She was still dead when we brought her here,” Abdullah said. However, the baby was less than £ 5 overall, despite gaining more than £ 1 in the hospital. It wasn’t even half the original. Her doctors said it would take some time for her to leave the hospital.
This afflicted Mr. Abdullah. She left six other children in Beledweyne, about 200 miles away, on a small, dry farm where goats are dead.
“Suffering in my hometown cannot be expressed in words,” she said. “I want to go back to the children.”