For the past year, famine has pummeled the Horn of Africa as a whole, but Somalia has been the hardest hit — and the situation is getting worse. Severe drought has made food and water scarce enough to pose challenges for any nation but it’s even more daunting for Somalia, a failed state which hasn’t had a functioning government since 1990.
In place of government control, extremist militants aligned with the terrorist group Al-Shabaab and roaming bandits hold sway in almost every pocket of the country outside of the capital of Mogadishu. And of course offshore there’s the pirates, which according to Reuters are currently holding more than 300 foreign nationals for ransom and 40 ships captive.
International aid groups such as the Red Cross are struggling to respond to the most devastating famine to strike the region in more than 60 years. The fact that Al-Shabaab has banned foreign aid workers has only exacerbated the problem.
It is easy to be discouraged given Somalia’s current crisis and long history of failure, but the international community must not give up on urgent efforts to help the innocent victims – especially women and children.
United Nations officials last week stated that tens of thousands of Somalis have died over the last few months, more than half of them children. They said the famine has recently spread to a sixth area of the southern part of the country, putting up to 750,000 more people at risk in the next few months unless aid efforts are increased dramatically. Experts predict the drought might end in October but then seasonal rains could exacerbate diseases such as cholera, malaria and others already infecting refugee in neighboring Kenya, where more than 400,000 Somalis have fled.
Being a Third World country rife with conflict, Somalia does not have the medical facilities or resources to deal with such an epidemic .
The United Nations made an emergency appeal for $2.4 billion to help Somalia in July and currently is about $1 billion short. American officials such as U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice said the biggest need right now is access — getting food to starving people in Mogadishu and the hard-hit farming areas.
The problem of delivering aid in extremely dangerous conditions has eased somewhat after Al-Shabaab withdrew in July from Mogadishu after a month-long siege. But, as Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times wrote last week, both Al-Shabaab and the Somali government are splintering off into competing clans and factions amid signs that the warfare between these groups will intensify – namely over competition for increasingly scarce resources and cost of living increases.
Because it is so dangerous for aid groups to operate in Somalia, the U.S. and other donors are trying to be more creative and use local traders to get food and medicine to vulnerable populations in the country. Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Persian Gulf states such as Qatar — Somalia’s major trading partners — should use their political and economic influence to persuade both the Somali government and militant groups to do more to help donors deliver aid to the starving. That doesn’t mean just food, but water and medicine as well.
Somalia will never end the vicious cycle of devastating famines and aid dependence if both they and organizations such as the UN do not also make it a priority to improve governance, eradicate rampant corruption and end conflict in the region. Further, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States should use their regional clout to ensure that, this time, Somalia makes real progress.
The lives of potentially millions are at stake.