Why East Africa Is Facing Its Worst Famine in Decades

A combination of armed conflict and the most severe drought in at least four decades is tipping the Horn of Africa region into a disaster. With crops failing and livestock dying, the number of people urgently in need of help had grown to 21 million by November from 13 million at the start of the year, and many were selling their possessions to eat. Aid agencies were mobilizing, but the help was still well short of what was required, leaving the region at risk of the kind of calamitous famine that ravaged Ethiopia in the 1980s and claimed an estimated 1 million lives.

Climate change has been blamed for four consecutive failed rainy seasons since 2020 across the region that comprises Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda. Crops wilted and much of what remained was lost to the worst locust invasion in at least 25 years. That left countries more reliant on food imports, but supply chain bottlenecks created by the coronavirus pandemic inflated prices of basic goods on world markets, leaving them unaffordable in many poorer nations. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent prices shooting even higher as it disrupted Ukrainian exports of grain and cooking oils, important sources of nutrition for several African countries.