Somalia’s swelling famine

last updated 8 January 2015

Hundreds of Somalis starved to death each day this week as famine spread to the sixth of eight regions in their country’s ravaged south. The U.N. said at least 4 million of Somalia’s 8 million people now need food aid; without it, 750,000—half of them children—will die within weeks. Many Somalis are now too weakened by hunger to travel to cities, where food is distributed, or to refugee camps in neighboring Kenya. And the situation will only worsen next month, when the rainy season begins, bringing cholera and malaria. The U.S., Somalia’s largest donor, has given more than half a billion dollars this year, but the U.N. is still short of the nearly $1 billion it seeks to address the crisis.

This is a man-made famine, said Unni Karunakara in the London Guardian. What’s keeping Somalis from getting the aid they need is the “brutal war” between the Transitional Federal Government and armed opposition groups, most notably al Shabab. That Islamist militant group blocks food aid, considering it a nefarious Western plot. Somalia will never break free of the famine cycle until it gets a real government, said the Johannesburg Times in an editorial. A summit this week, which brought together the transitional government and the leaders of breakaway provinces, was a “promising development,” mandating a new constitution and elections within a year. But unless al Shabab comes to the table, war will continue, and with it famine.

As horrific as conditions in the Horn of Africa are, they could have been worse, said Dan Glickman and George Rupp in FoxNews.com. This famine is smaller than the one in 2002 because a U.S. program gives local farmers access to drought-resistant seeds and fertilizers. But now that “progress is under threat” as Congress seeks to slash foreign aid. Unless we continue to fund food security, Americans will keep seeing “tragic images of innocent children dying” in Africa—and will know that we could have prevented it.