The acute drought in the Horn of Africa is expected to worsen this year and threatens the region with a famine worse than the one that killed hundreds of thousands of people a decade ago, warned on Wednesday February 22, a regional climate monitoring program.
Forecasts of the rainy season expected from March to next May “show decreases in precipitation and high temperatures”, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development’s Center for Climate Prediction and Applications (Icpac) said in a statement ( IGAD), a grouping of East African countries. However, this rainy season contributes significantly (up to 60%) to the total annual rainfall in the equatorial countries of the Horn of Africa.
These forecasts confirm the fears of meteorologists and aid agencies that this drought of unprecedented duration and severity could quickly cause a humanitarian catastrophe. “In parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda that have recently been badly affected by drought, this could be a sixth straight aborted rainy season,” Icpac said.
The Horn of Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change, with increasingly frequent and intense crises. The five consecutive failed rainy seasons have so far caused the death of millions of livestock, the destruction of crops, and forced millions of people to leave their region to find water and food elsewhere. According to Icpac, current conditions are worse than they were before the 2011 drought, with 23 million people already “acutely food insecure” in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.
“Act Before It’s Too Late”
The last famine was declared in Somalia in 2011: some 260,000 people, half of them children under the age of 6, died of starvation for lack of a fast enough response from the international community, according to the UN . At the time, the region had experienced two consecutive aborted rainy seasons, compared to five today.
On Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pointed out that around 1.3 million Somalis, 80% of them women and children, had to move to another region to escape the drought. If the stage of famine has not yet been reached, 8.3 million people, or more than half of Somalia’s population, will need humanitarian assistance this year, he added.
Workneh Gebeyehu, Executive Secretary of IGAD, called for urgent international mobilization in the face of this worsening drought. “National governments, humanitarian and development actors must act to have no regrets before it is too late,” he stressed.
