A major food crisis looms over the Sahel, a zone that extends across the African continent, separating Sahara and savanna. Some 2.6 million children are at risk of deadly malnutrition as pastoralist populations, largely dependent on biomass-rich pastures for grazing livestock, face widespread shortages of food and fodder. With a lack of rainfall and the early arrival of this year’s “hunger gap”—the period of seasonal scarcity between harvests—substantial biomass losses have been documented across the region, imposing food shortages on human and animal populations alike across Africa’s Sahel.