In northern Kenya, communities have resorted to eating the bark of the gingerbread tree. It is a famine food — consumed only when everything else has failed. The BBC documented families stripping bark from trees, boiling it for hours, and feeding the resulting paste to children who have not had a proper meal in days.
This is happening while the Iran war sends oil prices past $135 a barrel, making the fuel needed to transport food aid prohibitively expensive. The trucks that would carry relief supplies are parked. The diesel that would power water pumps is rationed. The fertilizer that would help the next planting season is stuck in ships that cannot transit the Strait of Hormuz.
Twenty-six million people across Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia face extreme hunger according to Oxfam. The number has been growing for months. The Iran war did not create this crisis, but it has made it dramatically worse — and it has diverted the international attention and resources that might have addressed it.
A child eating tree bark in Turkana County has no connection to a missile strike in Tehran. But the systems that link them — global oil markets, shipping routes, aid budgets, media attention — are the same systems that determine who lives and who dies in the 21st century.
The people eating gingerbread tree bark did not start this war. They cannot end it. They cannot even influence it. They can only endure it, and hope that someone with power eventually notices they exist.
