Ten Years On, Somalia's Lower Shabelle's Farmers Still Can't Go Home: A Decade of War, Land Disputes, and Aid That Never Reaches Far Enough

It was the latest wave in a displacement crisis that has been building in Somalia's Lower Shabelle region for a decade, and there is no sign it is reversing. Aadan Rooble knows the pattern well. He walked for part of the ten days it took him to reach Mogadishu after airstrikes made the decision for him — the farm his family worked in the village of Farxaano was no longer somewhere anyone could stay. His sons now find casual work when they can. He doesn't expect to go home. He's one of tens of thousands of farmers who have fled Somalia's Lower Shabelle region over the past decade, arriving in Mogadishu's displacement camps from towns like Afgoye, Shalanbood, Buulo Mareer, Qoryooley, Janaale, Awdheegle, and Wanlaweyn. The fighting that drove many of them out has often moved on since. Almost none of them have gone back — and the reason isn't the one usually assumed. This reporter grew up in Shalanbood, completing primary school there before finishing secondary school in Marka in 2006 and leaving Somalia that same year. He returned to the country in 2014 and spent the following decade based in Mogadishu, staying in close contact with relatives and community members still in Shalanbood — following, through them, the same decline in farming life this investigation now documents at scale. Three causes, one region War is the most visible driver. The long fight between the government and Al-Shabaab has repeatedly changed hands over towns like Buulo Mareer, most recently in a 2023 Al-Shabaab attack on an African Union base there. In parts of Lower Shabelle, the fighting has not moved on at all: Al-Shabaab retook roughly five districts across Lower Shabelle and Middle Jubba by late 2025 as African Union forces withdrew, and two Lower Shabelle districts, Kurtunwaarey and Sablaale, remain under the group's control as of mid-2026, according to the European Union Agency for Asylum's security assessment. For farmers displaced from those areas, return is not a question of cost or willingness. There is nowhere yet to return to. Land is the older one. Lower Shabelle's farmland has been disputed since 1991, when militias from outside the region seized land from local farming communities. That dispute never got resolved. Clan clashes over land around Wanlaweyn, including between the Rahanweyn and Gaaljecel, have been documented for well over a decade, flaring, quieting, and flaring again. Climate is the quiet one. Drought and river flooding have wiped out entire growing seasons on their own, conflict or no conflict. In Shalanbood, farmers displaced in late 2025 by a mix of fighting and failed rains are now living in open ground where sand blown in from the coast is burying what's left of the land. These three causes rarely act alone. A farm that survives a drought can be lost to conflict two years later. One farmer in Shalanbood told this publication the town's main irrigation canal, once connected to Janaale, has gone undredged so long that most of the town can no longer farm at all. In Janaale itself, a 60-year-old farmer described paying two authorities in a single day — a religious tax to Al-Shabaab, which controls the farmland by day, and government tax again at night when he returns home. Most people in the camps never owned the land It's easy to picture Mogadishu's camps full of dispossessed landowners waiting to reclaim their farms. Most were never owners at all. They worked someone else's land for a wage. A UN OCHA report on Somalia's displaced found that most IDPs work as porters, domestic staff, and day laborers. A World Bank and UNHCR study found it's host communities, not the displaced, who are more likely to actually own farmland. That gap goes back generations: Lower Shabelle's farming labor has long been drawn from Bantu and Jareer communities who, according to the European Union Agency for Asylum, were stripped of their farms under Somalia's 1970s land-reform laws, then had what remained looted by clan militias after the state collapsed in 1991. That distinction matters. It splits the crisis into two very different problems. For the few who owned land, the cost of returning is the wall Fieldwork for this piece in Afgoye and Shalanbood found that farm labor — weeding, clearing, harvesting — is priced by the jibaal, a plot measuring 25 by 25 metres, or about 625 square metres (roughly 6,730 square feet). A worker earns $7 to $10 per jibaal and can clear one or two a day, putting daily pay around $7 to $20. Bringing a farm that has sat idle for years back into production — replanting, repairing irrigation, paying for labor before any harvest comes in — can run into the thousands of dollars. Omar Mohamud Ali farmed for fifteen years near Wanlaweyn before three failed harvests in a row left him with an unpaid $500 debt for seeds and equipment, he told Radio Ergo. He has spent three years in a Mogadishu camp since, still hoping to go back, still unable to clear that debt. No aid program found in this reporting comes close to covering costs like that. Cash transfers over the past decade — from $93 a month in a 2017 European Commission-funded program to $85–180 a month more recently — were built to cover food and basic needs, not fund a farm restart. For laborers, the job itself is often gone For the larger group who worked someone else's farm, the barrier isn't the size of the wage on offer. It's that if the owner hasn't returned, there's nobody hiring. It's worth directly confronting an assumption that comes up often: that displaced people are choosing aid over work because it's easier. Somalia's own labor data argues against this. A recent study by Somalia's Institute of Economic Affairs found the poor and non-poor work at nearly identical rates, and traced low incomes to a lack of available work rather than unwillingness to work. A 2024 survey of IDPs in Galmudug, conducted by the Joint IDP Profiling Service, found 55 percent rely on daily labor as their main income, against 16 percent relying on aid. In Mogadishu's camps, that daily labor takes the form of laundry, construction, firewood collection, and small trading — work that is often harder to find and worse paid than the farm labor it replaced. What aid actually does Cash assistance isn't irrelevant, but its role is narrower than it first appears. For a small number of recipients, it becomes investment capital, and it visibly changes their plans. A woman in Baidoa's Barodi camp used $180-a-month cash aid to build a shop and then a butchery, and told Radio Ergo she now intends to build a life away from the camps rather than return to her village. But for most, aid functions as a floor, not a lifestyle. When World Vision cut off cash support to nearly 500 families in two Baidoa camps in 2025, nobody packed up to go home — families simply lost their only reliable income, because no farm was waiting for them either way. There's a mirror version of this problem for farmers who never left. In Buulo Mareer, a local farmers' union leader told Al Jazeera that the area's best farming years came during a period when Al-Shabaab banned NGOs from operating there, because food aid bought abroad had been undercutting what local farmers could sell. Different mechanism, same effect: aid competing with farming rather than supporting it, on both ends of this crisis at once. Building somewhere else, on purpose Not everyone is waiting. In Garasbaley, on Mogadishu's edge, 103 displaced families — many originally from Lower Shabelle's farming towns — formed a rotating savings group in 2025, Radio Ergo reported, each paying $4.50 a month, specifically to buy land permanently rather than keep renting or hoping conditions at home would improve. After Radio Ergo's report on the group, a local businessman donated over $29,000 to secure land for the families still waiting. It isn't a story about dependency. It's displaced farmers using the tools they have to build something lasting, because a real return home was never actually on offer. Ten years on Ask people living this what they actually want, and the answer is rarely more cash. It's the ability to farm again without it costing more than they can raise. Land disputes were never resolved. Irrigation has broken down past casual repair. Farmers who stayed are taxed twice a day by two different authorities. And a decade of aid, however necessary to keep people alive, was never built to cover what a real return would cost. Aadan Rooble and families like his aren't choosing displacement over home. They're stuck in the gap between what going back would take, and what anyone has offered to help them do it. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ismail Abukar is Co-founder and Chairperson of the Organization for Prisoners' Rights (OPR). He has conducted primary field research in Somalia for seven years covering prisoners' rights, enforced disappearances, press freedom, and electoral corruption. His investigations have been published by African Arguments and Horn Observer, including "The Disappeared" (June 2026), "The Journalists Who Disappeared" (August 2026), and "A Government With One Foot Out the Door: Somalia's Foreign Passport Crisis" (August 2026). He holds an MA in International Law and Human Rights from the University for Peace (UPEACE) and maintains an active ORCID record: 0009-0003-1435-3691.