DOOLOW, Somalia – When her crop failed and her dehydrated goats died, Hirsiyo Mohamed left her home in southwestern Somalia, carrying and coaxing three of her eight children on the long walk through a barren and dusty landscape in temperatures reaching 100 degrees. .
Along the way, her 3-and-a-half-year-old son, Adan, pulled at her robes and begged for food and water. But there was nothing to give, she said. “We buried him and walked on.”
They reached a relief camp in the town of Doolow after four days, but her malnourished 8-year-old daughter Habiba soon developed whooping cough and died, she said. Sitting in her makeshift tent last month, with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Maryam on her lap, she said, “This drought has killed us.”
The worst drought in four decades threatens lives in the Horn of Africa, with up to 20 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia at risk of starvation by the end of this year, according to the World Food Program.
Aid donors, targeting 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, Somalia’s country director for the World Food Program, a UN agency.
With the rivers low, wells running dry and their livestock dead, families walk or board buses and donkeys — sometimes hundreds of miles — just to find food, water or emergency medical care.
Parents pour into the capital, Mogadishu, taking their malnourished children to health facilities such as Benadir Hospital, one of the few in the country with a pediatric stabilization unit. The beds on a recent visit were full of bony babies with scaly skin and hair that had lost its natural color from malnutrition. Many of the children were also sick with diseases such as measles, and were fed through nasal tubes and needed oxygen to breathe.
Mothers sat in the hallways, slowly feeding their children the peanut butter used to fight malnutrition. The price of this life-saving product is expected to rise to 16 percent as a result of the war in Ukraine and the pandemic, which made ingredients, packaging and supply chains more expensive, UNICEF said.
In the hospital’s cholera treatment ward, Adan Diyad held the hand of his 4-year-old son Zakariya as the boy’s protruding ribs swayed. Mr. Diyad had abandoned his corn and bean fields in the southwestern region of Bay after the river went low.
In Mogadishu, he settled with his wife and three children in an overcrowded IDP camp, where they had no toilet and not enough clean water. Without work, he could not feed his family. Zakariya, usually cheerful, became emaciated. The night before Mr. Diyad carried him to the hospital, he said he continued to listen to his son’s heartbeat to make sure he hadn’t died.
In rural areas of southern and central Somalia, danger and poor road networks make it difficult for authorities or aid organizations to reach those in need. The United Nations estimates that nearly 900,000 Somalis live in inaccessible areas controlled by the Shabab, although aid workers believe those numbers are higher.
Mohammed Ali Hussein, the deputy governor of the southern region of Gedo, acknowledged that local authorities were often unable to leave the areas they control to rescue people in need, even when receiving an emergency call.
Extreme weather events, some of which are linked to climate change, have also devastated communities, with flash floods, cyclonesrising temperatures, a plague of locusts that destroyed crops, and now four consecutive failed rainy seasons.
“These crises just keep coming, one after the other,” so people have not had a chance to rebuild their farms or herds, said Daniel Molla, chief technical adviser on food and nutrition for Somalia at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. .
Those uprooted by the drought arrive in towns and cities where many are already struggling to pay for food.
Somalia imports more than 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 rising inflation have led to sharp increases in the prices of cooking oil and staples such as rice and sorghum.
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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 other retailers sold meager supplies of cherry tomatoes, dried lemons and unripe bananas to the few customers that trickle in.
Some shoppers were displaced people with food stamps from aid organizations, who were concerned about rising food prices.
Traders such as Adan Mohamed, who runs a juice and snack store, say they had to raise their prices after the cost of sugar, flour and fruit rose. “Everything is expensive,” said Mr Mohamed, mixing pineapples imported from Kenya. And while wages were relatively unchanged, many Somalis said they have cut back on meat and camel milk. More than three million herd animals have died since mid-2021, according to regulatory authorities.
The drought is also putting pressure on the social support systems on which Somalis depend during crises.
As thousands of hungry and homeless flooded the capital, the women of the Hiil-Haween Cooperative looked for ways to support them. But faced with their own sky-high 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 something,” said Hadiya Hassan, who runs the cooperative.
Experts predict that the upcoming rainy season from October to December will most likely fail, shifting drought into 2023. The forecasts are troubling analysts, who say deteriorating conditions and delayed funding scaling may reflect the severe drought of 2011 that killed about 260,000 people. Somalis.
“There are terrifying echoes of 2011,” said Daniel Maxwell, a professor of food security at Tufts University who co-authored the book “Famine in Somalia.”
For the time being, the merciless drought is forcing some families to make hard choices.
Back at Benadir Hospital in Mogadishu, Amina Abdullahi stared at her severely malnourished 3-month-old daughter, Fatuma Yusuf. The baby clenched her fists and gasped for air. The baby let out a faint cry, which brought a smile to the doctors who were happy to hear her make any noise.
“She was as quiet as death when we brought her here,” said Mrs. Abdullahi. But even though the baby had gained more than a pound in the hospital, she wasn’t even five pounds in total — not even half of what she should have been. Doctors said it would be a while before she was fired.
This hurt Mrs. Abdullahi. She had left six other children in Beledweyne, about 320 miles away, on a small, parched farm while her goats were dying.
“The suffering at home is indescribable,” she said. “I want to go back to my children.”