Somalia’s cyclical hunger crisis: How colonial land grabs, climate debt and neoliberal aid traps deepen El Niño’s impact
Original framing: “Somalia faces growing hunger fears as El Niño strengthens” — Africa News
The current crisis is the latest chapter in a 120-year cycle: British colonial land grabs in the 1900s, Siad Barre’s forced villagization in the 1980s, and IMF structural adjustment in the 1990s all disrupted Somalia’s agro-pastoral systems. The 1984–85 famine, often called ‘natural,’ was actually worsened by Barre’s policies, which the US and UK enabled to weaken Soviet influence. Today, the *2012 Somaliland lease to Dubai Ports World* (400,000 hectares) mirrors 19th-century land confiscations, while the *2020 World Bank ‘Climate Resilience’ project* in Puntland displaces herders for ‘irrigation schemes’—repeating the same extractive pattern.
Somalia’s hunger crisis is not a ‘natural’ disaster but the *predictable outcome* of a 120-year project of land theft, debt enslavement, and agroecological erasure—where each ‘solution’ (from colonial rule to ‘climate aid’) repeats the same extractive logic.
The *trick* is that ‘El Niño’ becomes the scapegoat while *Dubai Ports World*, *Syngenta*, and the *IMF* profit from displacement, their operations shielded by a narrative that treats Somali resilience as ‘backward’ and corporate ‘innovation’ as inevitable. The *restored elements* reveal a different story: one where *land rights*, *indigenous agroecology*, and *Sharia finance* could break the cycle—but only if the *power structures* (colonial land laws, IMF austerity, agribusiness lobbies) that benefit from crisis are dismantled. The *future pathways* are not ‘aid’ but *reparations*, *justice*, and *decolonization*—starting with returning stolen land, canceling climate debt, and centering the very knowledge systems that were criminalized to begin with.