Oxfam reports that 26 million people face extreme hunger across Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia. In parts of northern Kenya, communities have resorted to eating the bark of the gingerbread tree — a famine food that signals desperation beyond what aid agencies can easily address.
This is happening as the Iran war disrupts global energy supplies through the Strait of Hormuz, forcing African countries to ration electricity and dilute petrol to stretch diminishing stocks. BBC has documented the cascading effects across the continent — rolling blackouts in Ghana, fuel shortages in Uganda, diesel rationing in Tanzania.
Asia, meanwhile, is ramping up coal production to compensate for the oil disruption, accelerating the climate change that is simultaneously driving the drought that is starving East Africa. The circle is as vicious as it is invisible to those who created it.
Twenty-six million people are hungry because of a combination of drought, conflict, and a war in Iran that they had no part in starting, no ability to influence, and no protection from. The oil that flows — or fails to flow — through the Strait of Hormuz determines whether a farmer in Turkana can afford fertilizer, whether a hospital in Mogadishu has generator fuel, whether a child in Addis Ababa eats today.
This is what global interconnection actually means. Not the optimistic version sold at Davos — the real version, where a missile strike in the Persian Gulf translates into empty plates in East Africa.
