Somalia’s hungry head for a war zone

“Nobody could farm anything; so I headed for Mogadishu on foot. It took me a week,” he told me.

He had come from a village in Lower Shabelle – often referred to as Somalia’s breadbasket but now one of the regions where the UN has declared a famine.

Peering out through the windows of an armoured vehicle full of Burundian peacekeepers, I could see that parts of Mogadishu are full of the hustle and bustle of business.

There are plenty of shops selling colourful cloth, money transfer points, dentists and building materials.

But the landscape is changing as shelters are mushrooming on empty spaces being swallowed up by new camps.

This influx of the hungry and displaced is bound to add new security challenges for those charged with trying to make the capital safe.

Getting the aid to Mogadishu might be a straightforward task compared to accessing the swathe of al-Shabab held territory across southern Somalia – that is where the drought has hit hardest and where the help is needed most.

And with al-Shabab reversing an earlier decision to lift the ban on some international agencies, it looks as though the political fighting will hamper the fight to feed the hungry.