'We buried him and kept walking': Children die as Somalis flee hunger

DOOLOW (Somalia) • When her crops failed and her parched goats died, Ms Hirsiyo Mohamed left her home in south-western Somalia, carrying and coaxing three of her eight children on the long walk across a bare and dusty landscape in temperatures nudging 38 deg C.

Along the way, her 3½-year-old son, Adan, tugged at her robe, begging for food and water. But there was none to give, she said, and he died. "We buried him, and kept walking."

They reached an aid camp in the town of Doolow after four days, but her malnourished eight-year-old daughter, Habiba, soon contracted whooping cough and died, she said.

Sitting in her makeshift tent last month, holding her 2½-year-old daughter, Maryam, in her lap, she said: "This drought has finished us."

The worst drought in four decades is imperilling 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 Programme, a United Nations agency.

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 fertiliser.

The threat of hunger across Africa is so dire that earlier this month, the head of the African Union, President Macky Sall of Senegal, appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin to lift the blockade on exports of Ukrainian grain and fertiliser - even as United States 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 the UN Children's Fund (Unicef).

Aid donors, focused on the crisis in Ukraine and the coronavirus pandemic, have pledged only about 18 per cent of the US$1.46 billion (S$2.02 billion) needed for Somalia, according to the UN's financial tracking service. "This will put the world in a moral and ethical dilemma," said Mr El-Khidir Daloum, Somalia country director for the World Food Programme.

With the rivers low, wells dry and their livestock dead, families are walking or getting on buses and donkeys - sometimes for hundreds of kilometres - just to find food, water or emergency medical care.

Parents flow into the capital, Mogadishu, taking their malnourished children to health facilities like Banadir Hospital, one of few in the country with a paediatric stabilisation unit. The beds on a recent visit were packed with bony babies with scaly skin and hair that had lost its natural colour 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 per cent because of the war in Ukraine and the pandemic, which have made ingredients, packaging and supply chains more costly, according to Unicef.

At the hospital's cholera treatment unit, Mr Adan Diyad held the hand of his four-year-old son, Zakariya, as the boy's protruding ribs heaved. Mr Diyad had abandoned his maize and bean fields in the south-western 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," he 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.

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 Mr Daniel Molla, the chief technical adviser on food and nutrition for Somalia at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Those uprooted by the drought are arriving in towns and cities where many are already straining to afford food.

Somalia imports more than half of its food, and the poor in Somalia already spend 60 per cent to 80 per cent 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.

Experts forecast that the upcoming October to December rainy season will most likely fail, pushing the drought into next year.

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.

NYTIMES