The Horn of Africa faces famine due to its worst drought in 40 years

The Horn of Africa is facing its worst drought since 1981 and there are already 13 million people in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia threatened by famine, the World Food Program (WFP) reported on Tuesday in a statement.

The absence of regular rains in the last three years has ruined the crops and has caused a high mortality rate in livestock, which, together with the political instability and various conflicts in the area, paints a bleak picture.

The WFP fears a repetition of a humanitarian crisis like the one Ethiopia suffered in 2011, when 250,000 people died of hunger after a prolonged drought.

The United Nations agency has confirmed that the lack of rainfall has intensified since 2018. "Crops have been ruined, livestock are dying and hunger is increasing due to recurrent droughts that affect the Horn of Africa," said Michael Dunford, director of WFP in East Africa.

As water and pastures disappear, the situation worsens and families that depend on agriculture leave their homes and go to the suburbs of the big cities in search of sustenance.

The forecast is that in the coming months rainfall will be lower than the average for the time, so the risk of famine is increasingly high.

"The situation calls for immediate humanitarian action," says Dunford.

The most problematic areas are a particularly dry strip that runs through the three countries where 13 million people live at serious risk in this first quarter of the year.

Some 5.7 million Ethiopians in the south and southeast need food aid, including half a million children suffering from malnutrition, while in central and southern Somalia the number of hungry people is expected to rise from 3.5 to 4 .6 million between now and May.

In Kenya, for its part, some 2.8 million people need additional nutritional support to face the crisis.

The WFP calculates that some 286 million euros are needed to respond to the immediate needs of the population during the next six months, which will make it possible to provide response mechanisms to the most affected farmers and herders.

"The situation requires immediate humanitarian intervention and continued support for communities to build their resilience for the future," Dunford added in the statement.

The Kenyan government already declared the drought a national emergency last year while Somalia declared a state of humanitarian emergency.

The lack of rain also increases the danger of inter-community clashes over increasingly scarce resources, the WFP has recognized, in a region that already suffers from several violent conflicts.

The Ethiopian war that broke out in northern Tigray in November 2020 spread to two other regions of the country with the threat of affecting the capital, Addis Ababa.

At present, hostilities are once again centered in Tigray, where the blockade against the distribution of humanitarian aid to a population suffering the consequences of the conflict continues.

The United Nations says that some 50,000 children need urgent assistance.

At the same time, Somalia is going through a particularly turbulent period.

In addition to the terrorist threat that takes the form of attacks such as the one carried out by Al Shabab in Mogadishu a month ago, causing eight deaths, there is also political instability due to the delay in the elections.

At the end of 2021, Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, alias

, dismissed Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble, who accused him of trying to perpetuate himself in power.

The deployment of soldiers in the streets of the capital led to fears of the worst, but an agreement

to hold the presidential elections at the end of February allowed a return to relative calm.

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