An UN-brokered ship is taking 23,000 metric tons of wheat and corn from Ukraine to the Horn of Africa, thus initiating what could be the first of saving shipments intended to avert serious famine in Africa.
Sixteen other vessels have already threaded their way through Ukrainian mine fields in the Black Sea, evaded Russian attack, been inspected in Istanbul, and delivered their cargoes of vital grain to buyers in Europe and the Middle East. But this is the first of what is intended to be a lifeline of grain transports to relieve dire hunger in Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya – collectively the Horn of Africa.
This part of the world is particularly prone to drought, but global warming and shifts in monsoon arrivals and intensity, have produced the driest year since at least 2011 in the region, and especially in Somalia. It has not rained substantially for four years; 17 million Somalis, and another 25 million or so in the other nearby countries, rely on the rains to produce bananas, sorghum, cassava, maize, and grazing fodder for their goats and sheep.
According to the World Food Program, at least 18 million people in the Horn are at risk of outright starvation: 3.5 million in Kenya, 6.5 million in Ethiopia, and 4.8 million in Somalia, plus additional persons at risk in Sudan and South Sudan. In 2011, 260,000 Somali perished in another massive drought.
This section of the globe has long depended on bread made from grain from Ukraine and Russia to feed its populations when (as frequently happened) its own supplies run short. Thus, the failure of this year’s (and last year’s) rains, plus the unavailability of wheat, barley, corn, and sunflower oil from the usual suppliers - Ukraine and Russia – plunged millions in the Horn of Africa into presumptive death spirals.
If the truce in the Black Sea brokered by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres holds, this week’s delivery of 23,000 tons, followed by 7,000 tons on a second ship, will be the first two of many life-saving transfers of grain from today’s war zone to Africa’s famine districts. Ukraine has at least 22 million metric tons of grain stored in silos in or near Odesa and three other Black Sea ports. Some is long contracted-for, and the first sixteen ships carried those supplies to regular buyers with whom the World Food Program now has to compete. But, unless Russia reneges on it promise to Guterres to let grain ships traverse the Black Sea without attack, or unless hostilities in southern Ukraine erupt into more violence than now, UN-chartered carriers ought to be able very slowly to take essential grain supplies to vulnerable parts of Africa.
That vulnerability is palpable. Ethiopia, where most of the first allotments of grain will go once the initial ship docks in Djibouti, is a country of 110 million people. In its mountainous north, people traditionally rely on home-grown teff, a specialty grain. But the supplies from Ukraine are destined for southern and eastern Ethiopia, populated by Somali and Afar herders in desperate need. Some of first shipments from Ukraine will also be sent from Djibouti on the Red Sea to northern Kenya and Somalia.
The World Food Program hoped this week’s two vessels loaded with grain from Ukraine would be the first of what would “become regular shipments.” If so, deaths from sheer lack of food, especially among emaciated children, may be mitigated, averting the calamitous predictions of African and UN officials alert to what a lack of emergency food supplies could portend for the Horn of Africa countries, but also for the Sahel region (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad), and possibly even for East Africa’s crowded cities.
The peoples of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco also depend for much of their diets on pita bread (and similar) made with wheat from Russia and Ukraine. Urban populations in those countries will endure less hunger if the UN’s successful busting of the Black Sea blockade continues uninterruptedly. Then Ukraine can clear its silos to make room for this year’s ready to be harvested crops, and even Russia can continue sending wheat and barley to buyers around the globe.
The UN’s negotiated truce has also reduced grain prices sharply, making it possible for desperate countries to buy grain on the open market. Since the opening of shipping corridors in the Black Sea, the price of grain futures has fallen 40 percent from its high after Putin invaded Ukraine in late February.
In the Horn of Africa, the repeated failure of the customary rains has also brought pestilence in the form of renewed locust infestations to compound the cruelty of drought, for locusts eat what little grain might be growing. Additionally, the Horn of Africa is beset by war: al-Shabaab Islamists insurgents against the Somali state, Oromo rebels against the Ethiopian government. A civil war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray province also continues, exacerbating difficulties resulting from drought.
In arid Somalia, the country’s two rivers, the Juba and the Shebelle, are already flowing sluggishly; their levels are down by 35 percent. As those rivers dry up, so crops can no longer be planted along their banks. The critical banana crop in the Juba valley is particularly in danger, as are crops of food staples like sorghum and maize. Wells everywhere sit empty.
Somalia suffers daily from a civil war pitting the army of the Federal government of the Texas-sized state against warriors of al-Shabaab (“the youth”), the Islamist movement that controls half of contemporary Somalia. It extorts taxes from “residents” in its area and also collects “protection” money from businesspersons in areas nominally still run by the national administration. Most of all, al-Shabaab marauders raid government facilities throughout the country, even penetrating into Mogadishu, the capital. Its suicide bombers detonate themselves in crowded political meetings, restaurants, hotels, and beachfront cafes.
The vicious combat between Islamist insurgents and Somali and other African defenders convulses Somalia and spills over into northern Kenya, where the food shortages abound.
Just as the fate of perhaps 20 million Ukrainian civilians depends on the blunting of Putin’s war effort, so the continued existence of millions of Africans both south and north of the Sahara now relies on Putin keeping his word, and letting grain shipments exit from the war zone. Let us hope that these initial shipments are harbingers of flotillas more, a lifeline to limit starvation.
Thanks for sharing this good news about grain finally making its way to those who need it.