Published on: 05/09/2022 – 11:43 While Somalia is going through a period of severe drought, a UN representative warned on Monday of the famine that awaits the country, saying that two districts of the country could be affected before the end of the year. “The final warning” issued by Martin Griffiths: Somalia is on the verge of famine, said Monday, September 5, the head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the United Nations (Ocha), alerting on a disaster that Famine is knocking at the door. Today is a final warning. Somalia food and nutrition analysis report shows concrete indications that a famine is on the way. in two areas of the Bay region (…) between October and December this year,” Martin Griffiths told a press conference from the Somali capital Mogadishu. This disaster will affect two districts in the south of the country, those from Baidoa and Buurhakaba, he warned. Arriving in Somalia on Thursday, Martin Griffiths said he was “deeply shocked by the level of pain and suffering that so many Somalis are enduring”. Across the country, a total of 7 .8 million people, almost half of population, are affected by the historic drought, of which 213,000 are in great danger of starvation, according to UN figures. The stories of the families I met in Baidoa, #Somalia, need to be heard by people around the world. Their children are dying. Their livelihoods are gone. Their suffering is immense. We fear it’s about to get worse. We can’t allow that to happen. pic.twitter.com/mZew6ZMf5U— Martin Griffiths (@UNReliefChief) September 4, 2022 Mass exodusHunger and thirst have thrown a million people on the roads seeking help since 2021. The country is experiencing its third drought in a decade but the current one “has exceeded the horrible droughts of 2010-2011 and 2016-2017 in terms of duration and severity”, estimated Ocha in July. It is the result of an unprecedented sequence for at least 40 years of four rainy seasons insufficient in a row since the end of 2020. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the UN weather agency, alerted at the end of August to the high probability that the next season, scheduled for October and November, will also fail. The drought has decimated herds, essential to the survival of a largely pastoral population, as well as crops that had already been ravaged by an invasion of locusts that crossed the Horn of Africa between late 2019 and 2021. Somalia had been hit in 2011-2012 by a fa mine that killed around 260,000 people, half of whom were children under five. A state of famine was declared in several sectors in the south and center of the country between July 2011 and February 2012. With AFP