Putin’s Hunger Games: The Ukraine War Is Forcing Millions to Face Starvation
By Mac William Bishop and Mohamed Gabobe
August 13th, 2023
WASHINGTON AND MOGADISHU —Fadumo Abdi has been hungry for months now. She’s already lost one child to starvation and she doesn’t know if her surviving children will make it to the end of the year.
Having recently relocated to a camp for internally displaced persons, or IDPs, near Mogadishu after fleeing the drought-and war-ravaged areas of south-central Somalia, Fadumo has lost almost everything. She came to the capital hoping to find steady work, to figure out a way to ensure her children have a future.
“When we arrived here, there were no services or support,” Fadumo, a slender woman draped in a dark green hijab and brown dress, tells Rolling Stone during a visit to her camp. “The only help we got was from fellow IDPs, who gave us sticks and sheets to assemble a makeshift tent. But that was all.”
“Getting access to food and water for my children is out of the question,” she adds.
Veteran aid workers say hundreds of thousands of people are already “looking death in the eyes,” with 48 million facing an acute food crisis across East Africa this year.
Perched on a wooden stool in that tent, Fadumo has little time to worry about current events elsewhere in the world. She has her hands full trying to keep her two sons – eight-year-old Imran and seven-year-old Ahmed, who sit beside her on a torn mat that covers only a portion of the dirt floor – alive. It’s already been more than a day since their last meager meal, often just a few scraps of food shared by her neighbors in the camp. In any case, she’s never been outside of Somalia.
Fadumo doesn’t know that Russia recently pulled out of a key humanitarian agreement to allow grain and other foodstuffs to trickle out of Ukrainian ports. She doesn’t know that the resulting reduction in food shipments, volatility in commodity markets and rising prices for wheat mean even less humanitarian aid for millions of refugees around the globe.
