Long drought brings famine, death and fear
DOLLOW, SOMALIA » A man in a donkey cart comes wheeling through the dust, carrying two small, silent boys. The sky is overcast. It could rain. It won't. It hasn't for a very long time.
Mohamed Ahmed Diriye is 60 years old, and he's completing the grimmest journey of his life. He set off from a seaside city on the northern edge of Somalia two weeks ago. People were dying. Livestock were dying. He decided to abandon work as a day laborer and flee to the other end of the country, crossing a landscape of carcasses and Islamic extremist-held territory along the way.
Seven hundred miles later, he is exhausted. The food has run out. He clutches a battered stick in one hand, the nearly empty cart in the other. His boys are just 4 and 5.
They had tried to escape, Diriye says. “But we came across the same drought here.”
More than 1 million Somalis have fled and discovered that, too.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
In Somalia, a nation of poets, droughts are named for the kind of pain they bring. There was Prolonged in the 1970s, Cattle Killer in the 1980s, Equal five years ago for its reach across the country. A decade ago, there was Famine, which killed a quartermillion people.
Somalis say the current drought is worse than any they can remember. It doesn't yet have a name. Diriye, who believes no one can survive in some of the places he traveled, suggests one without hesitation: White Bone.
This drought has astonished resilient herders and farmers by lasting four failed rainy seasons, starting two years ago. The fifth season is underway and likely will fail, too, along with the sixth early next year.
A rare famine declaration could be made as soon as this month, the first significant one anywhere in the world since Somalia's famine a decade ago. Thousands of people have died, including nearly 900 children under 5 being treated for malnutrition, according to United Nations data. The U.N. says half a million such children are at risk of death, “a number, a pending nightmare, we have not seen this century.”
As the world is gripped by food insecurity, Somalia, a country of 15 million people shaking off its past as a failed state, can be considered the end of the line. The nation of proud pastoralists that has survived generations of drought now stumbles amid several global crises descending at once.
They include climate change, with some of the harshest effects of warming felt in Africa. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which stalled ships carrying enough grain to feed hundreds of millions of people. A drop in humanitarian donations, as the world shifted focus to the war in Ukraine. One of the world's deadliest Islamic extremist groups limits the delivery of aid.
The Associated Press spoke with a dozen people in rapidly growing displacement camps during a visit to southern Somalia in late September. All say they've received little aid, or none. A day's meal might be plain rice or just black tea. Many camp residents, overwhelmingly women and children, beg from neighbors.
Mothers walk for days or weeks through bare landscapes in search of help, at times finding that the withered, feverish child strapped to them has died along the way.
“We'd grieve, stop for a while, pray,” Adego Abdinur says. “We'd bury them beside the road.”