On average, a severely malnourished child is admitted to a clinic in Somalia every minute of every day. With crops and livestock decimated by the worst drought to hit the country in four decades, millions of Somalis are on the brink of starvation in an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.
Despite the crisis, the Somali government has been reluctant for months to declare that the country is facing widespread famine. That’s what interviews with government officials, officials from humanitarian organizations and analysts familiar with internal government discussions reveal.
According to aid officials, such a statement would allow more assistance to arrive, as it did during the great famine of 2011, and focus the attention of Western donors who are currently more concerned with responding to the aftermath of the Ukraine War.
The government of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, which came to power in May, resists characterizing the situation in these terms for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the government fears that this will weaken the goodwill with which the population views it and favor the terrorist group Al Shabab, just as the Armed Forces launched a large-scale offensive against the insurgents, who have plagued the country for decades and continue to launch devastating attacks.
The Somali government also fears that an official declaration of widespread famine could lead to an exodus of people from the worst-affected areas towards big cities, straining already scarce resources and fueling a rise in crime.
Mohamud is also concerned that such an announcement will discourage investors and divert money from international assistance to the emergency response – rather than long-term investments in development projects to fund health, education and climate resilience programmes.
The president acknowledged the dilemma in September, when he said that “the risk of declaring widespread famine is too great.” Such a statement, he said, “doesn’t just affect the victims of famine — it also halts development and alters prospects and all.”
In recent weeks, frustrated aid workers have insisted that the criteria for declaring a famine have already been met in some regions. In several meetings, they have pressured the government to declare a famine to draw attention to the crisis.
The famine emergency is affecting not only Somalia, a country of 16 million people: it affects an estimated 37 million people in the Horn of Africa. One of the main factors causing the crisis is the climate crisis, the main theme of the COP27 summit, which began on Sunday (6th) in Egypt.
Aid workers in Somalia fear a repeat of what happened in 2011, when more than half of the nearly 260,000 people killed in the famine died before it was officially declared. “The government is afraid of the F word – hunger,” said one humanitarian who requested anonymity. “But the situation is catastrophic, and the longer you wait, the worse it will get.”
Abdirahman Abdishakur, the president’s envoy for the drought response, acknowledged that humanitarian organizations have been pressuring the government to declare a famine, but denied that the government was hesitating to do so. He said there is no concrete evidence that the threshold of this crisis has already been crossed.
He also said that rich countries need to honor their promises to help poor countries like Somalia face the effects of the climate crisis. “It’s not about paying for charity or donating to Somalia,” Abdishakur, who is traveling to Western capitals to raise awareness of the situation, said in a telephone interview. “It’s also about justice.”
A specialized organization that assesses conditions of famine has made a determination regarding Somalia, but has not declared a situation of widespread famine.
A crisis can be characterized as one of widespread famine when 20% of families in a region face extreme food shortages, when 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition, or if two adults or four children in 10,000 are dying of starvation each day. . Experts can classify a famine, and humanitarian organizations can warn of it, but the decision to declare a crisis a famine rests with a country’s government and UN agencies.
According to Mohamed Husein Gaas, director of the Raad Institute for Peace Research in Mogadishu, by resisting the declaration of famine, the Somali authorities want to buy time, in the hope that the much-needed resources will eventually materialize anyway.
“But that’s not a good policy,” Gaas said. “We need to act promptly and save lives.”
Nimo Hassan, director of the Somali Consortium of Non-Governmental Organizations, said that technical definitions of widespread famine should not be an excuse for inaction. “The situation is outstripping available resources. We are trying to get drops of water into the mouth of someone who urgently needs to drink,” she said.
The most recent review of the situation in Somalia, released in September, projected that widespread famine would occur in two districts of the South Bay region between October and December and that severe drought conditions will persist until early 2023. already declared in heavily affected areas. UN experts have just completed a data collection on the drought situation and are analyzing the data, with the aim of releasing it to the public in mid-November. It is possible that this encourages the authorities to make a formal declaration of a famine situation.
Aid agencies say that since September, when the UN said widespread famine was “about to hit” Somalia, international assistance has been increasing, especially from the United States. But experts say fundraising efforts are not ramping up fast enough and donors should have reacted to the early warnings issued last year to stop the large-scale deaths and displacement now taking place.
“The question we should all be asking ourselves is the extent of the loss of human life, not whether it’s missing or missing an inch of some thresholds,” said Daniel Maxwell, a professor of food safety at Tufts University and a member of the Review Committee. of Hunger in Somalia.
“The calls for help are now clear.”
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