Somalia – Famine Looms Amidst Food Crisis Sparked by Ukraine War – Gender

More than 7 million Somalis face acute food insecurity, with almost 250,000 at risk of imminent starvation.

Story by Sudarsan Raghavan – Photos by Luis Tato

Children are ‘buried everywhere’

June 30, 2022 – By the time Farheiya Ibrahim arrived at the Waafi camp for internally displaced people on the fringes of Mogadishu, it was too late for two of her seven children. The camp is 300 miles east of the one in Dolow but has the same problems — it is overcrowded, with little access to clean water or sanitation. Both children had caught measles. Soon they had intense diarrhea and began vomiting. There was no health clinic nearby.

Ahmed, 3, his feet swollen by malnutrition, died first. A week later, his older sister Najma followed. She was 7.

“She went through the same pain her brother went through,” said Ibrahim, 39, with a blank stare. “One night, she vomited something green and died.”

Her neighbors in the camp buried the siblings side-by-side. There was no service because “nobody knew them,” Ibrahim said. She hasn’t visited their graves, which are only 50 feet from her makeshift hut and are now covered with trash — a piece of corrugated iron and a child’s brown shoe.

“If I see where they are buried, I will cry,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

Maka Ali, the 70-year-old deputy leader of the camp, said visits by aid agencies are infrequent. “People don’t have enough food,” she said. “Most of the children are malnourished.”

Across the country in the camps of Dolow, similar cases abound. Habiba Mahmoud walked 47 miles while nine months pregnant and went days without eating. When she finally arrived, she gave birth to twins — a girl and a boy. Both died soon afterward. Their graves are outside her hut.

Nima al Barre was so weak from hunger that she couldn’t breastfeed her 9-month-old twin girls, Ebla and Abdiya. Sugar and water weren’t enough to keep them alive. Their graves are here, too.

Habiba Mahmoud, 25, in her shelter at the Kahareey camp. She walked 47 miles while pregnant to get to the camp. When she arrived, she gave birth to twins, who died soon afterward.

The graves of Habiba Mahmoud’s twins, a boy and a girl, are not far from her shelter.

“Those who are under 5 are buried everywhere,” said Hussein Aden Barre, a camp elder.

At a feeding center for severely malnourished children, a steady stream of mothers and babies arrived.

The children had the diameter of their arms measured and then were placed in a bucket to be weighed. Most were underweight.

On one day this month, the center had only a week’s worth of UNICEF-distributed therapeutic food packets left.

“The support from UNICEF is not enough,” said Abduqani Mohamed, the nutrition officer for SEDA, a local aid organization that runs the facility. “All the efforts are focused elsewhere, especially on Ukraine. No one is giving priority to Somalia.”

Victor Chinyama, a UNICEF spokesman, acknowledged serious shortfalls in international assistance in camps in Dolow and elsewhere. “When the [U.N.] appeal is not fully funded, this is what you have on the ground. The needs are huge, but the funding to address those needs is not adequate.”

Like other charities, the World Food Program distributes $75 vouchers for the most vulnerable households to purchase food in the markets from designated vendors. But voucher holders are getting less food with the same amount of money. A kilo (2.2 pounds) of potatoes in Dolow cost 50 cents in March; now it’s $1. Cooking oil has gone from $5 a liter (about a quarter of a gallon) to $13 a liter. Therapeutic food packets have shot up from $40 a carton to $47 in recent months.

The story is the same in Mogadishu, where the cost of a 400-gram (14-ounce) can of wheat has doubled since February. Prices for other grains, vegetables and fruits have skyrocketed as well. “After the Ukraine war began, everything shot up in price,” storekeeper Hirsi Mohamed said.

“Many people would have survived if the Ukrainian crisis was not there and food was coming in,” said Hassan, the country director of Save the Children. “At least food prices would have been stable, and food would have been available.”

If purchasing power keeps declining and humanitarian relief doesn’t reach the most vulnerable, Somalia could experience a famine in the months ahead. Already, U.N. agencies are projecting that a fifth rainy season could fail in late 2022.

The previous famine killed an estimated quarter-million people, half of them younger than 5. Today, UNICEF estimates that 386,000 children are at risk of death without immediate treatment for severe acute malnutrition, already surpassing the 340,000 children who needed treatment in 2011.

“Unless there is an early and stepped-up further response, the risks are this could worsen to catastrophic levels later in the year,” said James Swan, the U.N. secretary general’s special representative for Somalia.

At the camp in Dolow, Sirad and her children had eaten only two small meals in three days, food provided by sympathetic neighbors. They were still sleeping on the ground, waiting for camp elders to erect a makeshift tent that would become their home. With no sense of what the future might bring, Sirad remains gripped by the past.

“When I sleep at night, I still dream about Amina,” she said. “I feel she is around me.”

Last week, she pulled Amina’s purple dress from the burlap bag. Her 3-year-old daughter, Nimo, who looks smaller than her years, playfully tugged at the dress. Sirad allowed herself a moment of hope.

“When Nimo reaches Amina’s age, I will give this to her,” she said, smiling faintly.

WUNRN

Famine looms in Somalia amid global food crisis sparked by Ukraine war – Washington Post