FAMINE IN SOMALIA
“Famines result from
a combination “ triple failure” : production, access, and response.”
Famine is the “triple failure” of food production, people’s ability to access
food and, finally and most crucially in the political response by governments
and international donors. Crop failure and poverty leave people vulnerable to
starvation but famine only occurs with political failure. In Somalia years of
internal violence and conflict have been highly significant in creating the
conditions for famine.
The UN uses a five-step scale,
called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC),
developed with NGOs including Oxfam, to assess a country’s food security. Stage
five, “famine/humanitarian catastrophe”, requires that more than two people per
10,000 die each day, acute malnutrition rates are above 30 percent, all
livestock is dead, and there is less than 2,100 kilocalories of food and 4
liters of water available per person per day.
Three
factors have caused the Somalia famine to be so severe, aid experts say: severe
drought, severe lack of governance and severe poverty.
First,
the Horn of Africa has experienced two seasons of unprecedented drought
conditions. Second, there's been a total breakdown in governance in Somalia
over the course of a civil war dating back more than 20 years. Third, people
are already extremely impoverished. And the three circumstances are perilously
interconnected.
"You have
not had a government in Somalia for 22 years," Oxfam's Shannon Scribner
told The Envoy. "There's a civil war. People suffer from extreme poverty.
When you add in the worst drought in 60 years, people don't have any assets to
cope. They don't have food reserves. They don't have livestock. When the
livestock dies, they don't have much left."
This famine represents the most serious food insecurity
situation in
the world today in terms of both scale and severity.
This is the first officially-declared famine in
Africa so far this century, at a time when famine has been eradicated
everywhere else.
The 21st Century is the first time in
human history that we have the capacity to eradicate famine. To do so, we must
address the underlying problems.
We must accelerate investment in African food production. There are
regions in Africa we know have always faced chronic food shortages, where even
small blips in harvests can have terrible consequences. We need more support for
small-holder farmers and pastoralists (e.g. hardier crops, cheaper inputs,
disaster risk management).
We must alleviate rural African poverty. More aid and budgetary
investment into physical infrastructure (roads, communications etc) and
allowing public intervention to correct market failures until markets are
stronger (e.g. grain reserves to stop price volatility).
We need to move away from discretionary assistance to guaranteed social
protection e.g. such as social assistance to the poor households to access food
throughout the year and insurances, so that support can be triggered
automatically in times of crisis. In some contexts cash transfers can be more
appropriate than food aid, where availability of food is not a problem.
Emergency aid is vital right now, but
we also need to ask why this has happened, and how we can stop it ever
happening again. The warning signs have been seen for months, and the world has
been slow to act. Much greater long-term investment is needed in food
production and basic development to help people cope with poor rains and ensure
that this is the last famine in the region.
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