A lack of financial will on the part of the international community may cause the country’s hunger crisis to devolve into its worst famine. Wealthy nations must step up.
In 2011, after Somalia faced three failed rainy seasons, a famine ravaged the eastern African country and killed a quarter of a million people. Half of them were children. It was a preventable tragedy, and the international community launched a “never again” campaign to end extreme hunger.
Yet, despite that pledge, Somalia today is experiencing a hunger crisis that’s shaping up to be even more dire: The country has now seen droughts in five consecutive rainy seasons — the longest and most severe drought in its recorded history — and many experts are warning that come summer time, this desperate situation could devolve into a famine worse than the last.
Now here is the cold hard truth: Famines in the modern world are effectively man-made. While natural disasters like droughts can certainly trigger a food shortage, it’s bad governance, political conflicts, and a lack of financial will on the part of the international community that end up raising the level of starvation and malnutrition to the point of so many deaths. And that’s what’s ultimately behind the current crisis in Somalia.
But it’s not too late to prevent the worst. The staggering level of food insecurity in the country has not yet officially been declared a famine, and if donor nations act swiftly enough, a famine may well be averted. After Somalia experienced severe droughts in 2016 and 2017, an effective humanitarian effort was able to pull the country back from the brink of a famine. And while Somalis are facing even more setbacks this time around — including Russia’s war in Ukraine, given that Somalia gets 90 percent of its wheat from those two countries — international aid, though still insufficient, has so far been successful in postponing the official conditions of a famine.
Still, there is no breathing room for the emergency response. The international system for declaring a famine is flawed in many ways, and the reality is that many parts of the country are experiencing famine conditions. (The official threshold of a famine is reached when at least 20 percent of a given population faces an extreme food shortage, 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition, and two adults or four children out of every 10,000 die of starvation each day.) And as Adam Abdelmoula, the United Nations’ resident and humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, recently said, for the millions of Somalis currently facing extreme food insecurity or acute malnutrition, the difference between current conditions and an official declaration of famine is “truly meaningless.”
Up until now, the United States has been a leader in funding the humanitarian response. In 2022, US funding accounted for 80 percent of the UN World Food Program’s emergency operations in the region, while the European Union only contributed about 10 percent. The United Nations and regional partners have asked for $2.6 billion to meet the minimum life-saving needs of nearly 8 million people this year, and wealthy nations must step up.
But in addition to funding, the United States can do more to ease the complicating factors that make delivering aid far too difficult. Many people facing famine conditions live in regions that are controlled by al-Shabaab, an Islamist insurgent group that the US government has designated as a terrorist organization since 2008. Its militants have systematically attacked aid workers and banned various humanitarian groups from working in their territories.
Al-Shabaab also often requires aid organizations to pay taxes or fees in order to enter their controlled areas. But as part of the United States’ counterterrorism efforts, US funded aid groups can face serious consequences — up to $1 million fines and imprisonment — if they financially assist organizations that the US government deems as terrorists. During the 2011 famine, the Obama administration eased limits on delivering aid to these regions by promising that the US government would not enforce counterterrorism laws against aid groups “in the event their operations may accidentally benefit al-Shabaab.”
Since then, the US government says it has worked with the UN to ensure that its sanctions don’t undermine humanitarian aid efforts. But as some aid agencies told the BBC, the United States’ counterterrorism rules have still stunted humanitarian workers’ reach in areas controlled by al-Shabaab because aid groups become overly cautious. That’s why, given the emergency, the Biden administration must make it clear to aid organizations that the United States will not penalize them if al-Shabaab is able to seize some financial gain as a result of humanitarian efforts in those regions.
The reality is that al-Shabaab has multiple sources of revenue, and taxes on aid groups will not make or break the organization. And when it comes to advancing counterterrorism efforts, one consideration that the United States should think of is what a lack of humanitarian assistance in al-Shabaab areas could mean for the group’s ability to prey on vulnerable people for recruitment.
But beyond the work that needs to get done in the next few months, what this hunger crisis underscores is the international community’s failure to build a proper emergency response system to food shortages — not to mention its failure to meet its own promise of ending extreme hunger in Somalia and elsewhere. Even in years when the country isn’t on the brink of famine, tens of thousands of Somali children die of hunger. Long-term foreign investments in strengthening the country’s infrastructure, including road access, agricultural and livestock support, and water management, are key to addressing such unnecessary death and preventing a crisis from reaching this scale again.
Ultimately, the world should heed the lesson from 2011: Don’t wait until a famine is officially declared to rise to the occasion; by then, it will be too late.
First published by Boston globe
