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channel4.com - July 14, 2011
An aid worker in Somalia, the centre of the East Africa drought crisis which has hit 12m people, tells Channel 4 News he fears "death on an epic, unimaginable scale" if more is not done.
Jens Opperman, the head of charity Action Against Hunger in Somalia, said the situation is deterioriating and will continue to do so unless there is a significant increase in international support.
"We are witnessing unimaginable human suffering," he told Channel 4 News.
The Horn of Africa's worst drought in 60 years has hit people across Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. It has caused perhaps the most serious emergency in Somalia, where hundreds of thousands have become displaced as they desperately seek food and water.
Mr Opperman estimated that 2.8m people in Somalia are in urgent need of life-saving humanitarian assistance. He estimated that one in three children is currently on the brink of starvation.
He said aid workers in refugee camps around the region are struggling to help the vast numbers who need aid.
"Somali children and families arrive completely mentally and physically exhausted, severely ill, injured. Often they have carried people for weeks without food. And aid workers are increasingly unable to save the lives of these people arriving at the camps."
Mr Opperman said the worst-hit areas were in rural and southern Somalia, and the groups worst affected were the most vulnerable - children, pregnant women, and the elderly.
"Every pound makes a different out here. People are living on nothing, have nothing. If we can provide water, food, and healthcare even on a basic level, that will prevent children just simply dying here every day," he said.
The head of the UN Refugee Agency, Antonio Guterres, described the drought as the "world's worst humanitarian disaster" on Monday and appealed for massive support, particularly to help those in the Dadaab refugee camp, the world's largest.
Mr Guterres urged more aid agencies to enter Somalia, after the militant group al-Shabaab - which controls central and southern parts of the country - said it would allow foreign workers to operate.
Mr Opperman agreed that international support was desperately needed, both to address the immediate emergency and to prevent disasters of this type happening again in the longer term.
"If we do not address this crisis I fear we will see death on an epic scale. If we do not do something about this, the numbers of children and families dying will be on a scale that is unimaginable," he said.
http://www.channel4.com/news/fears-of-death-on-an-epic-scale-in-somalia-crisis
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Somalia Cries for Help as World Boosts Drought Response
reliefweb.int - July 18, 2011
By Ali Musa Abdi (AFP)
MOGADISHU — Somalis stranded in war-ravaged Mogadishu pleaded for drought relief on Monday, as the UN called an emergency meeting to tackle what Britain's premier described as the region's worst catastrophe in a generation.
The severe drought parching east Africa has left 10 million facing hunger and the scope of one of the world's worst unfolding humanitarian disasters conjured up memories of Ethiopia's devastating 1984 famine.
"It is becoming increasingly clear that what we are seeing today is the most catastrophic situation in that region for a generation," British Prime Minister David Cameron said during a press conference in South Africa.
"Tens of thousands may have died already, many of them children under five," he said in Pretoria, at the start of an African tour.
Britain on Saturday promised £52 million (59 million euros, $73 million) in emergency aid, and Cameron urged other nations to follow suit.
The UN food agency on Monday announced that a meeting on the crisis would be held on July 25 at its Rome headquarters.
"The meeting will be next Monday 25th here at FAO" following a request from France in its role as head of the G20 group of leading world economies, said Erwin Northoff, a spokesman for the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Tens of thousands of Somalis have fled their country to seek assistance in neighbouring Kenya and Ethiopia, but many could only make it to Mogadishu, often considered the world's most dangerous city.
In the overcrowded Mogadishu camp of Badbado, people say they are in dire need of food for survival.
"The aid agencies are concentrating on feeding those who fled Somalia to neighbouring countries," said Ahmed Abdullahi. "They are less helpful to those inside."
"Some of us can't reach Kenya," said Mumina Mohamed, a mother from the Lower Shabelle region. "It is too far, and difficult to come back home later."
Stories of how aid groups are providing more supplies in neighbouring countries are common amongst those seeking shelter in Mogadishu.
"I am sure there are plenty of aid agencies in Kenya with a lot of food," said Maryam Abduqadir, a mother from Bay region.
At the Badbado camp, a Qatari aid agency provides food twice a day, but supplies are rapidly running out.
"The need of the people here is too much," said aid official Duraan Ahmed Farah. "We need more help, to get more aid agencies in, including the UN."
People here were aware that a volatile security situation meant there was little hope of large-scale humanitarian intervention.
Large areas of southern Somalia are controlled by the Al Qaeda-inspired Shebab rebels, who only recently lifted a two-year-old ban on foreign relief groups.
The first UN airlift into rebel held areas landed on Wednesday in the town of Baidoa, containing five metric tonnes of food and medicine.
But as major Western donors grappled with dire debt crises and aid agencies begged for funds, Cameron argued that trade deals could be more useful to Africa in the long run than aid.
"In the past, there were marches in the West to drop the debt. There were concerts to increase aid. And it was right that the world responded," Cameron wrote in an article in South Africa's Business Daily ahead of his arrival.
"But they have never once had a march or a concert to call for what will in the long term save far more lives and do far more good -- an African free trade area."
UN chief Ban Ki-moon's adviser on the Millennium Development Goals, Jeffrey Sachs, argued at a press conference in Nairobi that the human consequences of Africa's droughts were avoidable.
"We've been warning, almost day in and day out, of the growing calamity of the dry lands of Africa, and most of this has fallen on deaf ears in Europe and the United States among people who should know better," he said.
"We can never address these problems through emergency response. We have to solve these problems through prevention," Sachs said. "Prevention means development, especially sustainable development.
http://reliefweb.int/node/426554
UN Steps Up Efforts to Bring Urgent Relief to Millions in Need
UN News Centre - July 21, 2011
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said today it will start airlifts within days to get vital supplies into Somalia, which is bearing the brunt of the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa, and is preparing to open up a number of new land and air routes to bring urgent relief to millions in need.
The announcement comes a day after the UN declared a famine in two regions of southern Somalia owing to the worst drought in decades, and appealed for urgent resources to provide assistance. It is the first time since 1991-92 that the UN has declared famine in a part of Somalia.
“There is a life and death situation here in Somalia,” WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran said while on a visit to the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
“At one of our feeding sites in Mogadishu, where we are supplying food for hot meals, I met a woman who had lost children as they trekked out of the famine area in search of food,” she added.
Nearly half of the Somali population – 3.7 million people – are now estimated to be in crisis, with an estimated 2.8 million of them in the south.
The agency is currently reaching 1.5 million people in Somalia, and is scaling up to reach an additional 2.2 million people in the previously inaccessible south of the country.
WFP welcomed the recent statement by the insurgent group Al-Shabaab, which controls areas of southern Somalia, that humanitarian aid will now be allowed into those parts of the country.
“We are testing the ground to see how we can best get life-saving supplies in as quickly as possible to those at the epicentre of the famine in the south,” said Ms. Sheeran. “People in the south of Somalia are too ill and weak to go in search of food, so we must bring it to them.”
The agency is getting ready to open up new land and air routes into the core of the famine zone – southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle – to establish the necessary operating conditions, including those that will secure the safety of humanitarian personnel.
“The situation in Somalia is critical,” stressed the WFP chief.
Also visiting Mogadishu today was the UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, B. Lynn Pascoe, who was joined by the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Somalia, Augustine Mahiga.
The visit, intended to show solidarity with the people of Somalia amid the suffering caused by the drought, included meetings with the Somali leadership on a variety of political issues such as the end of the transitional period.
“This is a terrible famine, children are literally dying on the road, there is widespread malnutrition, we are all deeply affected and this will be a huge focus of attention in the months to come,” Mr. Pascoe said at a news conference in Nairobi, Kenya, after his return from Somalia.
“During my trip to Mogadishu the Somali leadership made it very clear that this will be a top priority,” he stated. “They emphasized that help is needed in Mogadishu itself because of the huge number of refugees but are extremely concerned about the situation across the country.”
Ongoing conflict and the recent drought have forced more than 160,000 Somalis to seek help in neighbouring countries so far this year, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Many of them arrive in Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya in a very bad state – exhausted, emaciated and severely malnourished.
“They are coming with almost nothing; just the few clothes they have on their back and a few jerry cans,” says UNHCR’s Paul Spiegel, who was recently in Ethiopia’s Dollo Ado area, near the Somalia border, to meet the new arrivals.
Dr. Spiegel, who heads UNHCR’s Public Health and HIV section, said that on average, between 1,500 and 2,000 new people were arriving daily, some after having walked for over one month.
“I have been to many emergencies before – in fact I am just back from a two-month emergency mission in Côte d'Ivoire – but I have not seen such magnitude of death and malnutrition for many, many years,” he stated in an interview published on the agency’s website.
UNHCR has stepped up its efforts in the area to reduce the waiting time for registering new arrivals, to ensure that people both at the reception and transit centres receive hot meals, and provide special care to children under five who are malnourished as well as pregnant and lactating women.
Meanwhile, UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres was in Geneva, where he joined Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos and the Special Adviser on Africa, Cheick Sidi Diarra, for a special event on the Horn of Africa crisis held by the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).
Mr. Guterres commended the “open door and open heart” policy of neighbouring countries that had opened their borders for Somalis fleeing their homeland, adding that the international community should mobilize support to both help these countries and to avoid similar crises in the future.
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=39106&Cr=somali&Cr1=
Eleven Million at Risk in Horn of Africa
by Dennis Foynes - ipsnews.net
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 19, 2011 (IPS) - "I have never seen anything like it. Many mothers have lost three or four children. It's a tragedy out here," Austin Kennan, regional director for the Horn of Africa for Concern Worldwide, told IPS from within the crisis zone.
The United Nations and humanitarian workers report that food insecurity is now at emergency levels across the Horn of Africa, affecting Kenya, Ethiopia and especially south Somalia, with 11 million people in dire need of emergency assistance due in part to a major prolonged drought.
"From our point of view, this is the worst drought we have seen in Africa since the 1950s, but it must be remembered that this is not the only factor that led to this level of crisis," Alun McDonald, media and communications officer for the Horn, East and Central Africa at Oxfam, explained to IPS.
"The effects of high staple food prices and the conflicts in the region over the last few decades have become all the more devastating due to the drought," said McDonald, who is based in Nairobi. "This combination has wreaked havoc in the region."
So dire is the situation that the Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab has lifted restrictions on foreign aid workers coming into the areas in Somalia they control.
But many aid workers and agencies are wary of returning. For example, the U.N. World Food Programme states that it won't even consider returning to Al-Shabaab-controlled territory until after an 18-month absence.
Valerie Amos, the U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator, spent two days in the region earlier this month. "I spoke with a woman who walked five hours with her children to get help," Amos said. "More and more children are malnourished. Livestock has died as has a way of life. People have lost everything."
Many Somalis have simply abandoned their bone-dry farms and moved into the capital Mogadishu in hopes of avoiding starvation.
Scores of civilians have gone further. The rate of refugees arriving from Somalia into Ethiopia surged from 5,000 a month to 30,000 in the second week of June alone.
The influx is even larger in neighbouring Kenya. The U.N. states that thousands of Somalis crossing the borders are arriving in the world's largest refugee camp, Dadaab, in Kenya.
The camp intended for 90,000 people now has around 380,000 refugees and is unable to cope, the U.N. says.
A few miles away from Dadaab lies a brand-new refugee camp built by the U.N. for 20 million dollars in 2010.
Yet it lies empty due to complaints from the Kenyan government that opening the camp will bring too many refugees and provide cover for the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab among others who have targeted the country in the past.
International Aid
Late last week, a group of UK aid agencies including Concern and Oxfam launched a TV and radio fundraising appeal. The British government has also pledged 52 million pounds in aid to the region.
Since last year, when USAID's Famine Relief Warning System Network saw the crisis coming, the U.S. government has provided a total of 383 million dollars in emergency food and water, health care and hygiene supplies, including 348,000 metric tonnes of food.
But if a swift intervention is not organised by the international community, there are fears of a repeat of the famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, when around one million people died.
"More money and assistance is needed to provide the required levels food and water," McDonald said. "We estimate that around 800 million dollars will be needed to effectively tackle the problem. Slow pledges are being made but quicker action must start now. "
The U.N. is expected shortly to declare the crisis to be a famine in parts of southern Somalia.
The announcement will likely be made by Mark Bowden, humanitarian co- coordinator for Somalia in Nairobi, based on data collected by the Food and Agriculture Organization.
The use of the word "famine" is based on rates of hunger, death and malnutrition. These levels must also be widespread in order to justify the use of the term.
The use of the term is expected to focus more world attention and hence more aid to the troubled area.
McDonald stressed to IPS that, "The work must not stop once this crisis has passed. In the long term, we need to fix a broken system so this doesn't occur again. Issues such as food prices, agriculture dependency and grazing rights need to be tackled."
"We used to see a serious drought in Africa every 10 years, then it became five and now it's every two or three years," he added, in a reference to the global climate changes now occurring due to fossil fuel emissions.
U.N. Special Advisor Jeffrey Sachs agreed, saying at a press conference that, "The famine crisis in Kenya and the Horn of Africa will never be solved by emergency relief operations like what we are seeing now. What is needed is sustained investment in dry lands of the region to pull people out of the extreme poverty."
"The pastoralists have been so poor that whenever they experience drought, they are totally devastated. They need massive investments to strengthen them, not relief supplies," he said.
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56549
Poor Attention to Forecasts to Blame for Famine in Somalia
by Isaiah Esipisu - ipsnews.net
NAIROBI, Jul 21, 2011 (IPS) - The world had an opportunity to save thousands of lives that are being lost in parts of Somalia due to the famine, if only the donor community had paid attention to the early warning systems that predicted it eight months ago.
"The situation would not have been this bad if there was emergency response for prevention, despite the conflicts in the country," said Anna Ridout, Oxfam’s spokesperson.
The United Nations declared a famine in south Somalia on Jul. 20, following the two-year drought in the country, and the high child mortality rate due to the lack of food in the region.
According to the U.N., the southern part of the country hosts 310,000 acutely malnourished children at the moment. At the same time, nearly half of the population in Somalia is threatened with the famine. In some regions, at least six out of 10,000 children under the age of five die daily.
The death rate is three times higher than what the U.N. Children’s Fund defines in a famine, which is two people per 10,000 per day.
According to Oxfam, the U.N. announcement, which is the first one in the region this century, should be a wake-up call to the rest of the world.
"There has been a catastrophic breakdown of the world's collective responsibility to act. 3,500 people a day are fleeing Somalia and arriving in parts of Ethiopia and Kenya that are suffering one of the driest years in six decades. Food, water and emergency aid are desperately needed. By the time the U.N. calls it a famine it is already a signal of large scale loss of life," Oxfam said.
The organisation said that emergency aid was vital now to avoid people dying in massive numbers.
"Whenever there is an indicator of such a disaster, we must not only sit and wait for the emergency response. We can conveniently invest the funds by putting irrigation systems in place, vaccinating people, especially children, against anticipated diseases, and creating proper infrastructure to be used in case there is need for food supply," said Ridout.
Speaking from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, Ridout said that refugees arrive daily and in huge numbers from Somalia. Nearly all the children are malnourished and women are weak and wasted after trekking for days in search of water, food and a chance to live.
"They tell of horrible experiences of children who died along the way, and even adults who drop along the way because they cannot make it to refugee camps, mostly in Kenya or Ethiopia," she said.
The most affected areas in south Somalia include the Lower Shabelle, Middle and Lower Juba, Bay, Bakool, Benadir, Gedo and Hiraan.
The effects of the drought were made worse by the Al Shabaab militia group, which had blocked donor agencies from operating within its territories in 2009 – now the famine zones.
"We are praying that the October rains expected in the East African region do not fail. Or else, we are likely to have a crisis in the area due to the looming drought," said Ridout.
However, despite the drought in northern parts of Kenya, Somali refugees keep arriving at various refugee camps on a daily basis. In June alone, 68,000 Somalis arrived in Kenya and 54,000 in Ethiopia searching for food and livelihood. At the moment, U.N. records indicate that 1,700 and 1,300 Somalis are arriving daily in Ethiopia and Kenya respectively.
According to Mark Bowden, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, 300 million dollars is required to scale up the emergency response for the 3.7 million people in need in the next two months.
One of the biggest setbacks for food aid distribution has been Al Shabaab. However, the extremist group recently lifted its ban on international aid agencies.
"We have security advisors on the ground. But most important, humanitarian organisations in the country are already working closely with local community-based organisations to access people in need," said Bowden.
"We are also involved in dialogue (not negotiation) with all community-based organisations, including groups like Al Shabaab, to ensure that there is cooperation for the aid to reach those who need it," he added.
However, despite the challenges, humanitarian agencies have already put in place response mechanisms. In an effort to reach more children with life-saving interventions, the U.N. and its partners have scaled up emergency nutrition, water and sanitation, and immunisation efforts to combat malnutrition and reduce disease.
"We have already started airlifting urgently-needed medical, nutrition and water supplies into the worst-affected areas," said Bowden.
Compared to previous famines, the current situation in Somalia compares or exceeds those reported during recent years in Niger (2005), Ethiopia (2001), Sudan (1998) and Somalia (1992). However, this is the most severe food security crisis in Africa since the 1991/92 Somalia famine, according to the U.N. Between January and June this year, 300,000 people in Mogadishu were given food assistance by humanitarian agencies on a monthly basis. Approximately 100,000 malnourished children were treated through some 418 nutrition centres in south Somalia from January to May 2011.
The U.N. further reports that 93,000 people received shelter, especially in Mogadishu, where the majority of those displaced by the drought fled to from other parts of the country.
The current crisis in Somalia is expected to have an increasingly devastating effect on other countries in the region. However, generally, the Horn of Africa has 11.5 million people in crisis, including the 3.7 million in Somalia.
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56574