Horn of Africa: From One Drought to Another

submitted by George Bressler

guardian.co.uk - July 7, 2011

The problem is not just assessing the size of the current crisis, but also that droughts are an almost annual occurrence.

Every day 1,000 Somalis stream across the Kenyan border to Dadaab, which is full to bursting with 367,000 people and already constitutes the largest refugee settlement in the world. They arrive malnourished and dehydrated but – after a walk lasting weeks – grateful that they have made it to a point where they will get food and water. The exodus is not the only indicator that a major food crisis is brewing in the Horn of Africa after the driest year for 60 years.

In Somalia the price of the cereal red sorghum has risen by 240% in the last year, and a 90kg bag of maize is bartered for five goats now instead of one. The malnutrition rates of refugees arriving in Ethiopia are 45% – three times the rate that constitutes an emergency. Figures like these caused aid agencies to launch multimillion-pound appeals this week to address a humanitarian emergency in east Africa affecting up to 10 million people. Britain announced that it would give £38m in food aid to Ethiopia, which is generous. Would that other donors gave as much, even if that sum may only fund the World Food Programme operation in the country until September.

But the problem is not just assessing the size of the current crisis, which is sure to grow. It is also the fact that the droughts in this region have become an almost annual occurrence. There have been five in the last seven years and, in terms of numbers affected, this may not be the largest. The biggest crisis peaked in 2009 when 22 million people were affected.

Should everyone shrug their shoulders and put serial drought down to climate change? No, these are some of the least developed areas in Africa. Of course, Somalia is shattered by decades of intervention and insurgency, and the drought has got so bad in the areas controlled by the militant Islamist al-Shabab that it has lifted its ban on getting food aid from UN agencies. But the largest number affected are in north-eastern Kenya, where the lack of roads, the soaring cost of transport, the lack of access to markets makes pastoralists and their livestock vulnerable from one month to the next. As the NGO Care says, simple measures can strengthen their resilience – building water pans, leaving pastures spare, setting boreholes and maintaining them, and training health workers to diagnose diseases and provide treatment to livestock. There are larger structural problems such as migration routes blocked by land bought by agribusiness and tourism.

As it is, aid agencies race from one drought to another. And the fact that the shortfall in WFP funding is 42% in Somalia, and 67% in Ethiopia and Kenya, speaks volumes about the mentality of donors who are only moved to act when it is too late.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/07/horn-of-africa-drought