The Horn of Africa lacks water. The severe drought is expected to worsen there this year with the dramatic consequence of the threat of a famine more serious than the one that killed hundreds of thousands of people ten years ago, a regional climate monitoring program warned on Wednesday.
Forecasts of the rainy season expected from March to May next “show drops in rainfall and high temperatures”, said in a press release the Center for Climate Predictions and Applications (ICPAC) of Igad, a group of countries. from East Africa. However, this rainy season contributes significantly (up to 60%) to the total annual rainfall in the equatorial countries of the Horn of Africa (which includes Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and parts of Kenya, Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda, and sometimes extended to Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania).
Already millions of people displaced
These forecasts confirm the fears of meteorologists and aid agencies that this drought of unprecedented duration and severity could quickly cause a humanitarian disaster. “In parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda which have recently been badly affected by drought, it could be a sixth consecutive rainy season abort”, underlines ICPAC, considered as the organization reference climate by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization.
The Horn of Africa is a region particularly 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 areas to find water and food elsewhere.
A worse context than during the last famine of 2011
ICPAC says current conditions are worse than they were before the 2011 drought, with 23 million people already ‘acutely food insecure’ in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, according to the report. Igad and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
The last famine was declared in Somalia in 2011, and some 260,000 people, half of them children under the age of six, 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.