Somalia: The Real Causes of Famine

For a generation, Somalia has been a byword for the suffering of a failed state. It has been without an effective central government since 1991, when the former government was toppled by clan militias that later turned on each other.

Since 2006, the country has faced an insurgency led by Al Shabab, one of Africa's most fearsome militant Islamist groups. Al Shabab controls much of southern Somalia and has claimed affiliation with Al Qaeda since 2007.

For the first time in years, the Shabab is receding from several areas at once, handing the Transitional Federal Government an enormous opportunity to finally step outside the capital and begin uniting this fractious country after two decades of war. Instead, a messy, violent, clannish scramble is emerging over who will take control.

This is exactly what the United States and other donors had hoped to avoid by investing millions of dollars in the transitional government, viewing it as the best antidote to Somalia’s chronic instability and a bulwark against Islamic extremism.

But the government is too weak, corrupt, divided and disorganized to mount a claim beyond Mogadishu, the capital, leaving clan warlords, Islamist militias and proxy forces armed by foreign governments to battle it out for the regions the Shabab are losing.

2011 Drought and Famine

In the summer of 2011, the country was hard hit by a famine that extended across much of East Africa. A combination of drought, war, restrictions on aid groups and years of chaos have pushed 4 million Somalis — more than half the population — into “crisis,” according to the United Nations. Agricultural production is just a quarter of what it normally is, and food prices have soared.

The Shabab were blamed for much of the suffering, as it blocked many international relief groups from bringing food to famine victims. The Shabab, which had taken a beating in steady urban fighting against a better-armed, 9,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force, abruptly pulled out of the bullet-ridden capital of Mogadishu, in August 2011, leaving the entire city in the hands of the government for the first time in years.

The situation had only worsened by mid-August, when the United Nations confirmed that a cholera epidemic was sweeping across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis had fled into Kenya, Ethiopia and to camps in Mogadishu, where cholera and measles are preying upon a malnourished and immune-suppressed population.

In September the United Nations announced that Somalia’s famine had spread to a large chunk of the southern third of the country, including parts of Mogadishu and several farming areas, which means food production has been crippled.

At the same time, aid agencies acknowledged there may be yet another problem to reckon with: the wholesale theft of food aid. The United Nations World Food Program said they were investigating allegations that thousands of sacks of grain and other supplies intended for famine victims have been stolen by unscrupulous businessmen and then sold on the open market for a profit.

On Oct. 4, an enormous truck bomb was detonated right outside a highly fortified government compound in one of the few Mogadishu neighborhoods that Somalia’s transitional government actually controls. Dozens of people — many of them students standing around waiting for exam results — were killed, sending the signal that the Shabab may be making a comeback after several months of losing ground.

A Lack of Intervention

Is the world about to watch 750,000 Somalis starve to death? The rains will start pounding down in the fall, but before any crops will grow, disease will bloom. Malaria, cholera, typhoid and measles will sweep through immune-suppressed populations, aid agencies say, killing countless malnourished people.

In a way, this is all déjà vu. In the early 1990s, Somalia was hit by famine, precipitated by drought and similarly callous thugs blocking food aid and producing similarly appalling images of skeletal children dying in the sand. In fact, the famine back then was in the same area of Somalia, the lower third, home to powerless minority clans that often bear the brunt of this country’s chronic troubles.

But in the 1990s, the world was more willing to intervene. The United Nations rallied behind more than 25,000 American troops, who embarked on a multibillion-dollar mission to beat back the gunmen long enough to get food into the mouths of starving people.

But foreign military force, analysts say, has never succeeded in solving Somalia’s problems and it is not going to solve them now. This famine is not just about the Shabab’s blocking food aid. It is about a broken state and the human wreckage it is causing.

Somalia’s politicians have been too busy squabbling with one another to build institutions like a functioning health ministry or a sanitation department that would help drought victims. Some of the informal clusters of people in Mogadishu camped out for aid are already breaking up, and it is not clear where the displaced people are trudging to. Many aid agencies — and Western militaries — are justifiably wary of this environment, and so far the response to the famine has been well short of what is needed to stem the crisis.

In the 1990s, the American-led operation and the attendant relief effort saved around 110,000 lives, while 240,000 were lost to the famine. It is grim math, especially considering how enormous the aid operation was. The Refugee Policy Group study has a graph showing famine casualties, which tend to come in two spikes: one at the onset of the crisis, before the bulk of aid arrives; the other when the rains come. For the current famine, analysts are now bracing for possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Mired in Chaos and Violence

Few experienced aid workers believe that all, or even close to all, of the emergency food in Somalia reaches the people it was intended for. Because much of Somalia has been mired in chaos and violence for the past 20 years, large aid organizations tend not to base their own staff members there and instead appoint local groups to monitor aid deliveries, worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

In 2010, United Nations investigators said that a web of corrupt contractors and their cronies were skimming off as much as half of the food aid, though later internal United Nations investigations did not find evidence to support that. Back in 1991 and 1992, during Somalia’s last famine, warlords and their militias were notorious for commandeering food shipments.

One way the United Nations and its local partners are trying to combat the pilfering of food is by serving individual portions of porridge at special centers, as opposed to just handing out sacks of grain. The World Food Program, which has said that it will not cut back on aid deliveries because of the allegations of theft, is also asking contractors to pay them back for any food that was not delivered.

The transitional government promised to do whatever it can to help famine victims and denied that large amounts of aid had recently been diverted.