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Somalia, the place that could soon cover its landscapes with hundreds of thousands of tiny graves

2023-01-20T16:13:17.722Z


The African country is a desolate land of austere beauty, with two annual rainy seasons, which have not come for two and a half years.


MOGADISCHU, Somalia - Surviving a child is losing a piece of your heart.

The famine looming over the Horn of Africa could soon leave

hundreds of thousands of tiny graves

in that barren landscape.

Somalia is a desolate land of stark beauty, with farmers and goat herders eking out a living in lunar desert landscapes.

The country usually has two rainy seasons a year, but these have been missing for two and a half years,

wilting crops and leaving carcasses of goats and cattle

on the parched brown earth.

Families move, putting up colorful home-made shops and looking for work to earn money to feed

starving children.

This could be partly our fault:

the worst drought in four decades

is thought to be linked to climate change.

The implication is that

carbon emissions from rich countries are killing Somali children

, tying us to this crisis with a thread of moral responsibility.

Carbon emissions from rich countries are killing Somali children.

Photo: Giles Clarke/The New York Times

Such is the drought here: Sabirin Omar, a 14-month-old girl, suffers from

kwashiorkor

, an extreme form of protein deficiency.

Her skin is mottled and scaly, her hair is yellow and falling out, and her body is swollen from fluid retention.

"He doesn't eat enough," explained his mother, Amina Moallim, 27, who

has already lost three children

.

She recounted that the family had a hundred goats, but they have all died and the family only eats when she or her husband finds odd jobs earning

at most $2 a

day.

When they get money, the family eats only one meal a day, such as

rice with a little tomato paste

.

There is no money for protein, so Sabirin risks becoming the dead fourth child in the family.

Multiply Sabirin

by hundreds of thousands

and you start to get the picture.

The United Nations estimates that, as the crisis approaches famine,

1.8 million Somali children

under the age of 5 will suffer acute malnutrition by July.

The UN estimates that 1.8 million Somali children under the age of 5 will suffer from acute malnutrition in July.

Photo: Giles Clarke/The New York Times

The world's nutrition gaps


To travel to Somalia is to be baffled by

the world's nutritional gaps

.

- Chicago's Berco's Popcorn is offering

"super millionaire popcorn" with gold flakes for

$2,500 a large can.

- A package of Plumpy'Nut, a food rich in protein and energy for severely malnourished children like Sabirin costs

38 cents

.

Two or three packets a day can revitalize a child.

Lack of water, lack of peace


However, what is needed in Somalia is not just help, but also

peace

.

An Islamic extremist group,

Al Shabab,

is fighting the government, and the combination of war and drought has driven some 3.8 million Somalis from their homes.

I arrived at the Mogadishu airport on a United Nations plane.

The area around the airport is well protected (when no mortar shells are falling), and international aid workers live within this fortified area, but traveling outside is difficult.

An aid worker told me that he had been working in Somalia for three years and that he had only left the airport compound once to visit Mogadishu.

A Somali girl, devastated by severe malnutrition, at the Banadir hospital in Mogadishu.

Photo: Giles Clarke/The New York Times

When he traveled outside the protected zone, he did so in an armored vehicle escorted by a large group of armed men.

If it's so difficult for me to move around

with just my laptop

, imagine what it's like trying to provide assistance in remote areas of the country.

Another war - the one in Ukraine -

also kills children

here in Somalia.

About 90% of Somalia's wheat imports

used to come from Russia or the Ukraine

, and that war has pushed up the price of all food and fertilizer.

And perhaps more importantly, it has diverted attention and aid that would otherwise have eased the humanitarian crisis here.

- UNICEF estimates that the cost of preventing severe acute malnutrition is $55 per child per year, that is, only

15 cents per day.

- A large American dog easily consumes

$2 worth of food per day.

I don't mean to shame Americans who love their dogs and enjoy their luxuries (me included!), and the truth is that the United States has been generous to Somalia, providing

$1.3 billion

in aid since October 2021, two-thirds of the humanitarian assistance that is received here.

Europe and the Gulf countries can and must follow the American example and do more.

UNICEF estimates that the cost of preventing severe acute malnutrition is $55 per child per year, or just 15 cents per day.

Photo: Giles Clarke/The New York Times

But let's be real: these are responsibilities

the rich world should accept

when our pets are on diets and Somali children starve.

Hunger doesn't just kill children, of course;

it also takes them out of school and forces girls into early marriages, sometimes

to much older men.

Habiba Abdulahi, 40, has already lost four children and is caring for a fifth who is seriously ill.

Now a solution is proposed:

marry Luul, her 13-year-old daughter.

"With all the problems now, if I can find a good husband for her, I'll marry Luul off," he said.

Luul has not been consulted and is unaware that there may be a marriage in her future.

The girl's grandmother, Hawa Ibrahim, who has lost seven grandchildren, acknowledged that Luul is too young to marry, but she sees the wedding as a way out for family survival.

Thus, the family would not only have one less mouth to feed, but would also receive a dowry

from Luul

that could feed the others.

"If the man has good money, we

'll marry her off

," he said.

It seemed hard to me.

But I wondered: if he had lost seven grandchildren and was watching an eighth fight for his life, would he see things differently?

The famine of 2011


The 2011 famine in Somalia claimed 260,000 lives and followed a drought of three rainy seasons in which no rainfall came.

This time,

five rainy seasons have failed

and some fear that the situation is more serious.

But even when there is no drought, Somalia loses children to malnutrition at an appalling rate.

In 2020, some 72,000 children died in Somalia, half from hunger-related causes, according to UNICEF.

Let me acknowledge, however, that all the figures in this article

may be wrong

, as it is impossible to collect accurate data in an impoverished country in the midst of war.

UNICEF statisticians acknowledge that actual child mortality in 2020 could have been less than 35,000 or more than 156,000.

Somali statistics are full of oddities.

Supposedly

14% of women are obese,

although I didn't meet any of them, and child stunting due to malnutrition is supposedly below the African average.

I doubt it

.

But while the numbers for Somalia are uncertain, the famine and deaths are not.

Neither is the rapid slide towards further starvation.

- Bling H20 sells "artisanal alkaline water" in a bottle with Swarovski crystals for

$2,700 a bottle.

- Somalis in resettlement camps pay 4 cents to fill a 20-litre jerrycan with water.

It is double what it cost a year ago, so the water is becoming unaffordable for uses such as cleaning.

hygiene


"We use the water for cooking and drinking," explains Marko Ali, a mother huddled with her baby at Mogadishu's Banadir hospital.

"

We don't have enough water to bathe or wash our hands

."

Perhaps for this reason, his son, Mohamed, has

a serious case of cholera

.

Malnutrition often kills children indirectly, by weakening the body, so the immediate cause of death may be

cholera, measles, pneumonia, or diarrhea

.

"Hygiene gets worse in an economic crisis, when people can't afford to use water," said Dr. Hafsa Mohamed, a pediatrician at Banadir Hospital who, with the support of UNICEF and Concern Worldwide, is doing heroic work to keep children alive. sick children.

Most of the children in the hospital

have worms

, he said, showing photos of one child

vomiting worms

and another with a diaper full of them.

The parasites leave these children anemic, and the food they receive may end up in the worms instead of in their own bodies.

- An albendazole deworming pill, bought in bulk by UNICEF,

costs 4 cents

and can kill parasites.

- The average American spends more than

$1,300 a year on food that is wasted

and thrown away.

We can't fix all the world's problems, but I do believe we have some obligation to families who lose children to current weather disasters, even though there is inevitably some uncertainty about how much of a particular crisis can be attributed to global warming.

The climate is changing, and the United States has cumulatively emitted

12,000 times more carbon than Somalia

, so let's accept some responsibility.

How would we assume our responsibility?

It would mean an even bigger international effort, now, to avert this looming famine in the Horn of Africa and invest in resilience measures, like dams and drought-resistant seeds, so that famine doesn't follow every failed rainy season.

According to a study, every dollar invested in resilience reduces downstream losses and humanitarian spending by up to $3.

It is true that some aid will seem wasted.

We will give Plumpy'Nut to parents of severely malnourished children, and they will share it with their other hungry children.

Or maybe there are rains, the war subsides and the famine warnings turn out to be a false alarm.

It is fair to point out that aid workers have predicted ten of the last five famines.

The other risk, however, is that we will be embarrassed by the worst famine of this century and hundreds of thousands of children needlessly perish.

"Somalia is the epicenter of the global hunger crisis, with a scale of deaths potentially not seen in 50 years," said Reena Ghelani, UN famine coordinator.

"This generation of children will not recover."

While interviewing starving Somalis, I had an excruciating thought: An abused chicken or pig on an American factory farm is more likely to survive than a child in Somalia.

About 5% of American chickens die before maturity, while 11% of Somali children die before the age of 5…and that number will skyrocket if famine hits this spring.

We say that "all lives are of equal value", but the life of a Somali child is treated as if it were less valuable than that of a chicken destined for the table.

So can we afford to help Somalis?

On a moral level,

can we afford not to?

c.2023 The New York Times Company


Translation: Elisa Carnelli

ap​


look too

FAO warns that global agricultural intensification has been exhausted

Food and environmental conservation

Source: clarin

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