Drought killed 43,000 people in Somalia last year

First theUNIPCUN rains in Somalia failed in 2021. Then they failed again and again and again and again. For five wet seasons in a row, Somalis looked anxiously to the skies while their crops withered, their cattle perished and many people died of hunger or disease. A new report, released by agencies and the Somali government, estimates that there were 43,000 “excess deaths” in the country last year, relative to the typical level. Half of the dead were children under the age of five.This hunger is the deadliest in Somalia since the famine of 2010-11, which claimed 260,000 lives. And it will get worse before it gets better. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, whose modelling underpins the report, project that in the coming months 135 people will die every day from drought-related causes. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (), a affiliate that measures hunger, reckons that 6.5m Somalis will face “crisis”, “emergency” or “catastrophe” levels of food insecurity between April and June (see map).