Somalia under threat of a second famine

It has only been a month since the United Nations announced that the famine was over in Somalia...

Feb 10, 2012

It has only been a month since the United Nations announced that the famine was over in Somalia. Yet people are already struggling to find food again and malnourished mothers are struggling to produce breast milk to feed their children.TIME reports that the failed harvest in the city of Sahel is partially to blame for the renewed threat of famine.

In Gaet Teidouma, a small village in a plain of sand and rocks more than 800 km (500 miles) east of Mauritania’s capital Nouakchott, Kertouma Mint Sedatty tries to feed her 8-month-old son Mohammed in a tent made from sticks and rags. It’s not going well. Mohammed sucks desperately, but Sedatty hardly has milk to feed the child. “We ran out of food a few days ago,” says the 39-year-old mother of seven. “My children are hungry. Our three cows can’t find anything to eat and stopped giving milk. It’s going to be a very difficult year.” She pauses. “Most people won’t survive.”

Not even a month after the U.N. announced Somalia’s famine was over — notwithstanding the deaths of between 100,000 and 150,000 people in the past year — another hunger crisis of equal size is looming on the continent. Last year, around 13 million people in the Horn of Africa needed food aid.

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