Severe Drought Hits Horn of Africa

DAVID MCGUFFIN, NewsHour Special Correspondent: She is 60 years old. All she owns are the clothes on her back. Her livestock are dead; her crops have failed for three straight years. But Makay Sufi walked the 60 miles to this refugee camp on her own.

"I came in search of food and shelter," she says. "I have nothing. But even here, our monthly food rations only feed us for a week." Up to 500,000 Somalis like Sufi are on the move in a desperate hunt for food.

HASSAN ADEN FARAH, Aid Worker: This is the most worst drought we have faced us now -- that we faced now for the last 30 years. Children are dying, everything dying. Animals are dying. Camels, only a few are surviving. So this is a big problem we face now.

DAVID MCGUFFIN: These camps around Wajid have gone from just a few hundred people before Christmas to almost 15,000 now, and new families are arriving each and every day. The conditions here are absolutely squalid.

These refugees get food but little else from the international community. They live in homemade tents, feeble shelter from scorching daytime temperatures that reach 120 degrees.

The day we arrived in Wajid, a man was executed on the edge of town, a sentence handed down by village elders. His crime was killing another man over water rations at a distribution site. Things are that desperate.

In a country where warlords and militias have been fighting over Somalia's meager resources for 15 years, the fact that food aid is making it here at all is a bit of a miracle. On land, aid convoys are attacked despite heavy guard; by sea, Somali pirates have held U.N. food shipments for ransom.

ZLATAN MILISIC, Somalia Country Director, World Food Program: The humanitarian situation is getting worse. We have a major number of people who need our assistance, yesterday and not even today, and tomorrow will be too late.

And we are struggling to move through and deliver to them the necessary assistance. It doesn't help their societies, either, when they're in a constant state of unrest, and attacks, and problems.

DAVID MCGUFFIN: In a starving land awash with guns, the problems are never far away. Gunfire rang out as we approached this U.N. food distribution center, warning shots as people fought over bags of food. Too many hungry; not enough aid to go around.

Evidence of hunger can be seen everywhere. Dead livestock litter the landscape. This is true right across the Horn of Africa, in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and here in northeastern Kenya.

The smell of rotting carcasses around this waterhole here is overpowering. In a region where cattle and other livestock are the only livelihood, herds here have already been killed off at the rate of 70 percent.

Abdikhadir Amin (ph) was once wealthy by local standards. He used to have 120 head of cattle; only five remain. Once valued at $200 each, at best they would now fetch five dollars. In a part of Kenya with almost no industry or development, this is devastating.

"I don't know how we'll survive," Amin says. "Cattle herding is all I know. My family now exists only because of handouts." Experts and cattle herders agree it will take a generation at least to rebuild what's been lost here.

With the main source of food and income gone, malnutrition rates are soaring. Young children are always among the first victims.

Baby Shamsa Aden (ph) was admitted to hospital so badly malnourished doctors had trouble finding a vein to feed her intravenously. Her story is the same as many of the children in here: drought, death of family livestock, malnutrition, chronic diarrhea, dehydration.

Child malnutrition rates in Kenya's Wajir district are at 30 percent and rising. The U.N. and international aid agencies are appealing to wealthy nations to give $443 million to feed the eight million people most in need in East Africa. So far, they've only received a quarter of that.

Unless there is a more urgent response, aid workers warn people will start dying.