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Oxfam water engineers are having to drill deeper, more expensive and harder-to-maintain water boreholes used by some of the poorest communities around the world, more often now only to find dry, depleted or polluted reservoirs. 

A year and a half since the Covid-19 pandemic began, deaths from hunger are outpacing the virus. The worst is still yet to come unless governments urgently tackle food insecurity and its root causes head on. We need action to create fairer, more resilient and sustainable ways of feeding the world.

There is growing scientific analysis suggesting that the impacts of current and recent droughts in East Africa are likely to have been aggravated by climate change. Without global efforts to reduce emissions and to help the world’s poorest people cope with the effects of climate change, this crisis will continue to repeat itself.

For many people in East Africa, the current drought is the worst in living memory. Nomadic pastoralists are among the hardest hit. Their livestock is completely wiped out, meaning they have no means to feed themselves. In eastern Somaliland, Oxfam witnessed entire communities on the move, desperately searching for water and pasture.

Millions of poor people in Southern Africa, Asia and Central America face hunger and poverty this year and next because of droughts and erratic rains as global temperatures reach new records, and because of the onset of a powerful El Niño.

The G7 have made a stuttering start on climate but have largely neglected the plight of people living in poverty, said Oxfam at the close of the annual leaders’ summit in Germany today.

In response to WFP food cuts for Syrian refugees, Andy Baker who heads up Oxfam's response to the Syria crisis said: "Millions of Syrians have left their country to flee war, death and destruction. It is unthinkable to leave them hungry. Rich countries must step up and support the World Food Program."

Rising food costs, climate change and dramatic changes in land tenure are increasing the reality of hunger and leaving food-insecure people feeling they “are rated as the cheapest of the cheapest”.

The cost of weather-related disasters in the five years since global leaders last met to discuss climate change is almost half a trillion dollars ($490 billion) – three times more than for the whole of the 1970s.

In the middle of 2011 a massive food crisis hit East Africa and the first famine of the 21st century was declared in Somalia.