The InterDependent

A wrenching human crisis can’t get much worse than this. A famine begun by a drought of historic proportions on the Horn of Africa, compounded by lawlessness and violence in the worst affected country, Somalia, has put more than 10 million people in danger of starvation. The numbers are rising every day as hundreds of thousands try to flee across a treeless landscape littered with the bodies of skeletal cattle and the little mounds of new earth that mark the graves of those who didn’t make it to food or water.

Anyone who watched David Muir, a versatile, brave and always sympathetic ABC News reporter and his camera crew moving through the devastated streets of Mogadishu in an army tank this week with a contingent of African Union peacekeepers witnessed the unthinkable: soldiers in combat mode, shooting their way through snipers to deliver lifesaving food and other supplies. The Islamist militants of Al Shabab, who have brought lethal chaos to the streets, appear not to care whether their own people survive.

There are thought to be 2.3 million children in immediate danger in the Horn of Africa. In southern Somalia alone, at least 1.25 million children are acutely malnourished and at risk of dying, said Rozanne Chorlton, UNICEF’s representative for Somalia, now one of the world’s most heartbreaking jobs. “Too many of them have already died and many others are at risk unless we act now,” she said in Nairobi at the end of last week. Unicef has managed to get food into the region for about 65,000 children, she said, but distributing it has to be left in local hands.

Across the country, nearly half the Somali population, 3.7 million people, are in jeopardy, says the World Food Program.

In Kenya, local authorities, United Nations staff members from several key agencies and various nongovernmental organizations are doing what they can to handle hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia. They are also managing the crisis in Djibouti and parts of Ethiopia and Kenya itself where the drought has driven families from their homes and small farms. UN officials fear that Uganda could be next in terms of people starving, the Food and Agriculture Organization said today.

Stuart Price/UN Photo

A Somali woman hands her sick child to a medical officer of the African Union Mission in Somalia, a regional peacekeeping mission operated by the African Union with the consent of the UN. Somalia is experiencing a severe drought that has devastated swaths of the Horn of Africa, leaving an estimated 12 million people hungry.

The World Food Program has airlifted enough fortified food supplements from Europe in the last week to Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, to feed 100,000 children, and further flights are scheduled. Based on the average costs of the agency’s work across Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, it costs an average of only 50 cents to feed a child in the region for one day.

Valerie Amos, the under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs at the UN, spoke yesterday in New York, reiterating the urgency of the problem. “12.4 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti are in dire need of help, and the situation is getting worse.”

Donors, she noted, had committed more than $1 billion as of last week, but another $1.4 billion is necessary to save lives and prevent the famine from spreading further.

For information on how to donate, go to http://www.unhcr.org/emergency/somalia/global_landing.html

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