THERE IS one word that Mary Robinson has heard more than any other over the past two days and that is the Somali word for hunger: gaja.
The word has threaded her conversations with desperate mothers cradling babies with distended bellies, slack skin and glassy eyes at a health centre in southern Somalia, and anguished fathers telling stories of long roads travelled by foot on an empty stomach.
During Mrs Robinson's visit to the world's largest refugee camp in Dadaab, northern Kenya yesterday, the question of why tens of thousands have fled their homes over the border in Somalia was often answered quietly with a single word: gaja.
Now the world is waking up to the severity of the hunger crisis that has slowly unfolded across drought- ridden swathes of the Horn of Africa, from Somalia to Ethiopia and Kenya. The UN yesterday declared famine in two regions of southern Somalia and warned it could quickly spread unless donors took action.
“If we don’t act now, famine will spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months, due to poor harvests and infectious disease outbreaks,” Mark Bowden, humanitarian co-ordinator for Somalia said.
The UN says 3.7 million people across the country, or almost half the population, are now in danger. Of those, 2.8 million are in its southern belt.
In the most stricken areas, half the children are malnourished. “It is likely that tens of thousands will already have died, the majority of those being children,” Bowden said.
Several aid workers told Mrs Robinson that this year’s famine threatens to be on a much greater scale than that of 1992, because of years of drought, rising food prices, and long-running conflict.