On the Horn of Africa's dry dilemma

The Horn of Africa is one of the most environmentally fragile places on earth, where resilient people survive off the land amid centuries of tradition and culture. It's a stark but beautiful place, dusty on a dry day, gushing floodwaters on the rare moments when the skies open.

These are dry days in East Africa, in every sense. Across the region, rain has run dry, food stocks have run dry, and people's ability to cope is running drier and drier. In southern Somalia, the word we hoped we would never hear again is now being spoken for real - there is famine. Across Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda and Djibouti, 11 million people are in need of food assistance.

The World Food Programme (WFP) had - along with many other humanitarian organizations - been warning for many months that the situation in the region was deteriorating alarmingly fast. We have been particularly concerned about southern Somalia, where unacceptable demands and threats by the Al-Shabab militia forced us to withdraw from all but a few, small pockets of the capital Mogadishu in January last year.