Opinion: A Nation Left to Starve

“Famine isn’t caused by the weather; it occurs when a government decides not to act while it has the opportunity.” - Hassan Ali Khaire

Six million Somalis, who make up one-third of the population of this country, are experiencing severe hunger. Famine could become a real possibility from next month until January in the agropastoral regions of Bay, Bakool, Gedo, and Hiiraan, along the rivers, and in the displacement camps at Baidoa, Jowhar, Beletweyne, and Dolow. The rains are still several weeks away. The districts have already been identified. The Government of Somalia has no plan.

The situation affecting this country has been predicted, the date set, and its location identified. It is therefore preventable. If it occurs, it will not happen as a result of divine intervention; rather, it will happen because a state that had been given adequate warning chose to be in a different place.

The situation goes beyond anything most Somalis can express in words. At present, about a quarter of the population, some 4.8 million of our people, have to rely on humanitarian aid just to get by. Nearly two million of them are in emergency situations. It is estimated that this year 1.88 million children under the age of five will suffer from acute malnutrition, almost half a million of these cases being the severe form,which is fatal. Of the 852 million dollars the United Nations says are needed to keep these people alive, less than one-third has reached the country.

Allow me to address one point, since the case for it is strong. Aid budgets have been reduced this year worldwide, and those cuts were not made in Mogadishu. Somalia is therefore having to cope with a cutback which it did not initiate, just as a number of other countries are. However, that situation tests the government, not excuses it. In fact, in the case of a financing shock everyone could foresee, a plan should have been drawn up. No such plan existed; no item in the national budget is devoted to the humanitarian response, no national appeal, no campaign aimed at reaching the families most affected by the crisis. Instead, the administration has spent its last year shifting soldiers between regions in order to settle political disputes.

I am certain that the test can be passed since I have been on the other side of it. When Somalia declared a national disaster in February 2017, over six million people needed help, and serious forecasters expected a famine. However, the famine did not occur. Money reached families before their livestock died, water was delivered to districts before the wells dried up, and funds were raised because the world believed Somalia had a government willing to be accountable. The response was not quick enough nor generous enough, and deaths among the Somalis still took place. Yet the predicted disaster never happened, and it didn't happen because the state acted while it still had the opportunity. Famine isn't caused by the weather; it occurs when a government decides not to act.

The effects can be seen in all the places where children are being kept alive. According to UNICEF, 205 health and nutrition facilities have already been closed and, in the case of severe funding shortfalls, as many as 618 others could close too. Almost a million children under the age of five, as well as adolescent girls and women, would have no access to nutrition services. In the first six months of this year, the number of severely malnourished children admitted to stabilization centers increased by 32 percent, even though more children haven't become ill. This is because community services that used to detect them early have been abolished. Children now reach the hospital in worse condition, later than before, and at a much higher cost. Some of them do not go at all.

At the same time that those centers were closing due to a lack of funds, families in Mogadishu were being asked to pay at the public hospitals, including the Banadir Mother and Child Hospital, an organization intended for the very women who can least afford to pay. If a mother cannot afford to pay, then she is sent home. That is not a failure of financing. That is a decision, and someone in authority has made it.

Displacement tells the same story: OCHA reported 680,000 new cases of displacement in 2025, which has brought the total number of Somalis who have been displaced within their own country to 3.3 million. In just the second quarter of this year alone, over 216,900 people were driven from their homes—a figure that is nearly three times the number of people who were displaced during the same months in 2025. And the main cause was not drought; conflict and insecurity drove more than 115,700 of these displacements. This is displacement that is being caused by the state, not just a failure to prevent it. There is also no safety upon arrival: 159,437 people were expelled from the places where they had taken shelter by October last year, and nearly 200,000 more currently live under the threat of being evicted.

Our education system has followed the same pattern. The education cluster has found that drought has affected 829schools, 358 of which have closed completely and 471 are now on the verge of closing, disrupting the education of over 189,000 children. An estimated 78,000 have already left school altogether. Between January and June 2025, attacks on schools and the military use of such schools further disrupted the education of 150,000 children. In a country where nearly six out of ten children of school age were already not in school, classrooms are now being emptied faster than they are being filled, and no official seems to treat this as an emergency.

This leads us back to the rainfall. The FAO-SWALIM and the regional climate center have stated that there is over a ninety per cent chance of El Niño conditions continuing throughout the October to December Deyr period. The World Food Programme cautions that as many as 1.7 million people in the Juba and Shabelle areas might be affected by flooding. This is how a hunger crisis turns into famine: crops are lost at harvest, herds drown, roads are blocked, and relief aid cannot reach the districts that need it most, at the very moment they need it.

We can tell what it looks like since we have witnessed it. The floods in Deyr in 2023 resulted in 188 deaths among the Somalis, displaced well over a million people, and caused damage and losses amounting to some 176 million dollars. The rains are now several weeks away. There is no national plan for preparing for floods. Although the government's own disaster agency has already identified the districts at highest risk, this clearly shows the danger was recognized. Yet recognizing a danger is not the same as preparing for it.