The influx of farmers to the markets as a last resort has sent prices plummeting and put nearly 3.5 million residents in the south of the country on the brink of food insecurity, according to statistics from the UN World Food Program.

Farmers would rather sell their cattle than see them die for lack of water and pasture. That figure is just part of the 20 million people, half of them children, in Kenya, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia who are in urgent need of humanitarian aid this year because of drought, the source adds.

In contrast, torrential downpours in 19 states in central and west Africa, with their aftermath are depriving about five million people of food and drinking water, who are now in the category of internally displaced persons after losing their plots of mostly subsistence crops.

Concise studies put the number of hectares of crops devastated by torrential rains at one million hectares.

In two countries alone, South Sudan and Nigeria, the torrential downpours of the Anuel monsoon are threatening the lives of more than 910,000 people.

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