A Somali Boy’s Mission to Find Food as Climate Change Takes Its Toll

A Somali Boy’s Mission to Find Food as Climate Change Takes Its Toll

Each morning in this Somali border town, 11-year-old Bashir Nur Salat plots his day’s mission behind a crooked wire fence. Armed with only a friend’s yellow school shirt, a borrowed book and toothy grin, he eyes his prize through the mesh: lunch.

Bashir lives where three crises converge—global warming, spiralling food prices, and war. He, like millions of others in Somalia, are in the crosshairs of what some aid workers are calling “The Three Cs”: climate change, costs and conflict.

The worst drought in four decades in war-torn Somalia forced his family to leave their farm three months ago and to move about 100 kilometres north to the town of Dollow, on the border with Ethiopia. Now, he leads a pack of younger children who gather when the Kabasa Primary School serves its students food. Through the school’s wire fence, the children stare at students inside gulping warm porridge or plates of beans and corn served as part of a UN-supported program, one of the few regular sources of food in the town.

Many of the gang were among the latest influx of people into Dollow, who were too late to register for schooling. One by one, they slink through the broken gate and dart across the dusty schoolyard to grab a meal when the teachers aren’t looking.

“When I don’t get food, I’m so hungry: I lie down and I can’t sleep,” Bashir said quietly. He had eaten no dinner the night before nor breakfast that morning. His eight brothers and sisters at home were all hungry, he said.

At least 448 children have died since January while being treated for acute malnutrition, the United Nations said. The figures are likely a fraction of the true deaths since many will have been unable to reach help.

CLIMBING COSTS

Food prices have jumped by up to 160 per cent in parts of Somalia, due to the drought and global supply disruptions from the conflict in Ukraine.

Even in good times, Somalia imports over half its food.

The government has become alarmed by what it says is the slow international aid response, with its special drought envoy Abdirahman Abdishakur Warsame saying countries need “to pay attention to this drought before it becomes a famine.”

To date, Somalia has received just 18 per cent of the $1.46 billion it needs in humanitarian aid this year, according to UN figures—well below the level of response last year. Ukraine, by contrast, has received 71 per cent of its requested $2.25 billion for six months.

RELATIVE SAFETY

The Kabasa Primary School was established to cope with the influx of families ravaged by the 2011 famine. Admissions swelled again during the 2016-17 drought, when early humanitarian intervention kept the death rate low.

About one fifth of students typically leave school during hard times and never return, said Rania Degesh, deputy director of East and southern Africa for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The meal program entices them to stay in school. Schools in Somalia get 41 U.S. cents per child for two meals a day, said the UN’s World Food Programme. Outside, Bashir scrambled among the last students to receive their meals, emerging triumphantly from the scrum with a metal plate of bean and corn mash.

His grin was wide and his head held high. At last, he would eat.

(Source: Reuters)