Hunger & Hardship in the Horn

courtesy of BBC online

The Eastern Africa region, like the Sahel, is experiencing what has been described as the "most severe food crisis in the world today", with at least 10 million people affected in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). 

Somalia is one of the hardest-hit countries in the region, with deaths being reported in some areas amid alarming malnutrition levels. 

"We are no longer on the verge of a humanitarian disaster; we are in the middle of it now. It is happening and no one is helping," according to Isaq Ahmed, the chairman of the Mubarak Relief and Development Organization (MURDO), a local NGO working in the Lower Shabelle region of Somalia. 

He said: "In the three districts of Qoryoley, Kurtunwarey and Sablale [in Lower Shabelle] our estimate is that some 5,000 families [30,000 people] have been seriously affected by the current drought." 

Ahmed said those who can are moving towards Mogadishu in hope of survival. 

"Those remaining in the area are the ones who cannot even afford transport to Mogadishu," he said, adding that a number of people had died due to a combination of hunger and related diseases. “Most of those who died were children, the elderly, and lactating and pregnant mothers," he said. 

Up to eight people a day were being buried in Lower Shabelle, according to Sultan Sayidali Hassanow Aliyow Ibirow, a senior traditional elder in Lower Shabelle. Most of them were cattle herders who had lost everything. 

"Three years of little or no rain have led to this disaster. People have not recovered from their previous losses and now we have an even worse drought," he said. 

Driest season since 1950 

In many pastoral zones, this is the driest season on record since 1950. Drought conditions in Somalia have had regional implications, with refugees flowing into Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. The irony is that these three countries in particular are also suffering from drought and food shortages and struggling to keep their own populations free from hunger.

According to Save the Children, children arriving from Somalia in the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya are exhausted, malnourished and severely dehydrated. 

"Nearly every child or parent we have spoken to says they are not just fleeing fighting in Somalia - the drought and food crisis are equally perilous to them now,” said Catherine Fitzgibbon, Save the Children's Kenya programme director. 

Experts are warning that the situation could get worse in the short term if the delayed and poor rains cause the current crop to fail. 

In Ethiopia, the estimated number of people in need of emergency food and non-food assistance was revised upwards from 2.8 million to 3.2 million. Nearly two thirds of the requirements were in the southern Somali and Oromia regions as well as in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Region, where shortages of water and food were recorded. And if drought were not bad enough, cereal prices have continued to rise, with inflation rates close to 30 percent recorded in April. 

According to the Food Security and Nutrition Working Group, a regional forum, the rate of Somali refugees arriving in southern Ethiopia has jumped from 5,000 per month to more than 30,000 in the second week of June. Among new arrivals to the two camps in the Dolo Ado area, the Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) rate is 45 percent, way beyond the 15 percent emergency threshold set by the World Health Organization. 

In Djibouti, poor rains from March to May of this year hurt pastoral household food security and sent food prices shooting up. The average price of wheat flour increased by 17 percent between January and February 2011, to US$620 per ton, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Global Information and Early Warning System, GIEWS. 

Rising Prices and Falling Currency in Kenya 

In Kenya, rising inflation rates have also adversely affected poor households’ ability to buy food. Prices of the main staple, maize, have tripled from about 1,300 shillings (US$14.4) in January to 4,500 ($50) for a 90kg bag. 

Recently, the government announced the removal of tax on imported maize in a bid to cushion consumers. But millers say rising global maize prices mean the measure will have little impact on the commodity's prices locally. (Noor Guhad stands in the middle of the dry Oda earth dam, where water would have reached over his head three years ago. Now he has to dig deep to find water. Photo courtesy of www.ifrc.org) 

"The problem has been compounded by the fact that the Kenyan shilling has been on a free-fall, trading at an all-time low [about 90 shillings to the US dollar] not experienced in the country for almost two decades. I do not see the cost of maize dropping any time soon," said one local miller. 

The recent March to May “long rains” in Kenya were poor for the second or third successive season in most rangelands and cropping lowlands, with many of these areas receiving 10-50 percent of normal rains, noted the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET). 

The consequences include declining water and pasture, and subsequent livestock deaths. In the predominantly pastoralist north, a low milk supply has contributed to malnutrition levels soaring above 35 percent. The GAM rate in northwestern Turkana has hit 37.4 percent, the highest ever in the district. 

Nationally, at least 3.2 million people are currently food insecure - up from a projection of 2.4 and 1.6 million in April and January, respectively. 

Even in Kenya’s coastal region, thousands are food insecure, says the Kenya Red Cross Society’s (KRCS) region manager, Gerald Bombe, who oversees a Drought Response operation run jointly with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

/PC

thanks to our good friends at IRIN or the original version of this post.

Is Urban the new Rural?

Recently, I returned from Nairobi where we launched this year's edition of the World Disasters Report. The report focuses on Urban Risk not least because for the first time in the history of mankind, more people live in an urban environment than a rural one and in just 20 years, over 60 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities and towns.

A fortunate minority will live in places like Turin, Tokyo or Toronto, where if your home catches fire or floods, you can call for emergency help and expect to collect on the insurance. Everyone in the house or apartment probably has their own space and clean water is on tap. You are connected to the sewage system and your garbage is collected.

A slum household is one where all of these things are absent. There is neither water nor sanitation. The living space is cramped and comprises poor quality building materials. And the inhabitants have no security of tenure.

In a slum, your house will burn down in front of you because the municipal government does not provide emergency services to ‘illegal’ settlements. And even if they did, there would probably be no access road. Your children are more likely to pick up a disease because there is no drainage system for the floodwater and nobody will have cleared the streets of garbage.

The childhood experiences of the Brazilian president, Lula da Silva, as quoted in this year’s World Disasters Report, are pretty typical for the 1 billion people who live in urban slums today:

“When our house flooded, I sometimes woke up at midnight to find my feet in water, cockroaches and rats fighting over space, and various objects floating around the living room … Every time it rained, we used to nail another piece of wood across the doorframe and dump another truckload of earth to reinforce the barricade. But the water level rose further. And the authorities never did anything.”

The real crisis in disaster risk reduction revolves around the so-called ‘vulnerability gap’ in urban communities where the authorities often lack the finance, the knowledge and the will to ensure a well-functioning urban environment and the communities have few resources and lack political influence.

Many of the 50,000 people who can die in an unexceptional year from earthquakes, or the majority of the 100 million people who might annually expect to have their lives turned upside down by floods, live in squalor on dangerous sites with no hazard-reducing infrastructure and no services.

Given the already large deficit in infrastructure and services that exists in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the urban risk divide is only set to grow wider as climate change brings on ever more severe disaster impacts in some of the world’s most vulnerable locations. Millions of people will be regularly marooned on rooftops in cities such as Dhaka competing for space with snakes. In Alexandria, Egypt, a 50 cm rise in sea levels will make 2 million people homeless.

Most population growth in the next decades will be in towns and cities of low- and middle-income countries. This urban expansion is conducive to more disasters because of the failure of governments, and many large international agencies and NGOs to adapt to the reality of urbanization.



The truth is that too many aid agencies lack urban policies and are slow to make the necessary shift from rural development, which is still very essential, to finding ways to better support vulnerable urban communities.

One of the great challenges of the 21st century for the humanitarian aid community is to learn how to work with the untitled, the undocumented, the unlisted and the unregistered that live on the edges of our cities in the flood plains and seismic zones of cities like Managua and Istanbul.

Forcible eviction is a constant threat to the urban poor who live from generation to generation without security of tenure. When disaster strikes and they lose everything, they are all too often at the back of the queue.

Fortunately, there are some examples of how good urban governance can support communities in slum upgrading projects which lead to disaster risk reduction. In Thailand, for instance, the Community Organizations Development Institute has channelled government funds for upgrading slums to over 2 million households over the last 18 years, an impressive achievement by any standards.

Much of the future direction of aid in urban settings could depend on the success or failure of the enormous humanitarian and political commitment to Haiti in the wake of last January’s catastrophic quake. A new universal way of working with the urban poor must emerge from the rubble of Port-au-Prince, which will ensure that building back better in the wake of disaster means treating owners, tenants and informal dwellers equally by emphasizing security of tenure.

If widely adopted, such an approach would be a huge contribution to risk management and a good first step towards motivating communities on the frontlines of disaster zones around the world to concentrate their energies on disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.

And, back to our launch in Nairobi. One of the most important parts of the event was a community video produced entirely by young people of Kibera which is reputed to be one of the world's largest slums - this video presents life in a slum by those who know best, the residents. The urban poor are the real experts and need to be put firmly at the center of all efforts aimed at improving life in informal settlements and reducing the vulnerability of the population. This, we hope, is at least a good start.

/PC

Early Warning, Early Action

The Kenyan Red Cross takes preemptive action to stave off hunger in the drought-ridden east of the country.

Kenya is a country known mostly in 'the west' as a tourist haven and as one of Africa's better equipped economies. However, severe drought in the east has put as many as 10 million people at risk of starvation.

As written in an earlier blog such preventative action is not without risks. Donors are more accustomed to 'reacting' to emergency situations rather than trying to address causes before whole communities are decimated by famine.

Through its dynamic CEO, Abbas Gullet, the Kenyan Red Cross is working hard to create awareness and raise the required funds. They should be roundly applauded for addressing humanitarian needs in such a proactive fashion.

The International Red Cross is supporting its member national society on the ground and is scaling up its operations to address the chronic food security crisis in the Horn of Africa today where as many as 20 million people are considered at risk of starvation. Read this on the ground report by Anne Wanjiru, Titus Mung’ou and Andrei Engstrand-Neacsu in Yatta and Kiboko, east Kenya:

/PC