When the last of his 250 goats died, pastoralist Abdullahi Abdi Wali knew it was time to flee what he calls the “worst drought” in his 99 years of life.
“This is the first time I was displaced by a drought,” he said, looking back on his near-century in south-eastern Ethiopia.
After the death of his animals, Wali walked for five days under a scorching sun to reach a makeshift camp hosting 10,000 Ethiopian pastoralists outside the city of Gode, where they now receive food and water.
In the Horn of Africa as a whole, in an area stretching from northern Kenya to Somalia and swaths of Ethiopia, up to 20mn people could go hungry this year as delayed rains exacerbate what was already the worst drought in four decades.
After three consecutive rainy seasons failed and a fourth looks likely to do the same, crops have disappeared and more than a million livestock have died in Ethiopia’s south-eastern Somali region alone.
One more dry season could turn what is already a disaster into the worst drought in a century, locals say — just as the region is braced for what could be the devastating fallout of war in Ukraine. The conflict threatens not only to increase food prices but also to push the cost of fertiliser beyond the means of millions of farmers, threatening next year’s harvest.