Navigating Aid and Climate Pressures to Achieve Food Security in Somalia

Abstract Food security in Somalia remains a critical issue due to prolonged conflict, climate shocks, and economic instability. Recurrent droughts, floods, and locust infestations have severely damaged agricultural output, while conflict restricts market access and humanitarian assistance. As a result, millions face food shortages and high malnutrition rates, especially among children. Therefore, this study investigates the relationships between foreign aid, climate factors, and food security in Somalia using time-series data from 1990 to 2020. Autoregressive Distributed Lag model (ARDL) is employed to assess both short- and long-run dynamics, while Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) is used as robust. The long-run ARDL results reveal that food aid, average rainfall have a significant negative impact on food security in Somalia, while average temperature shows a negative, insignificant coefficient. Conversely, humanitarian aid significant positive impact on food security in Somalia. Moreover, the short-run findings show that food aid, humanitarian aid, and average temperature exhibit a positive, insignificant coefficient. While average rainfall shows a negative, insignificant coefficient. DOLS demonstrates coefficients similar to those of the ARDL model. The results of Granger causality reveal several unidirectional causal links. First, there is a unidirectional Granger causality from food security to food aid; humanitarian aid Granger-causes food security. Additionally, there is a unidirectional causality from food aid to average temperature. Furthermore, average temperature Granger-causes rainfall, indicating a climatic interdependency. Conversely, the analysis found no significant Granger causality between average temperature and food security, average rainfall and food security, humanitarian aid and food aid, average rainfall and food aid, average temperature and food aid, and average rainfall and humanitarian aid. Policy makers should focus on enhancing food aid transparency, aligning humanitarian aid with development, investing in climate-resilient farming, and promoting climate-smart agriculture.