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.

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

Praying for Rain

The Ethiopian government and its humanitarian partners in the country say nearly 5 million people require emergency food-aid this year, outside the governments own safety net programme. An additional 1.2 million mothers and children under five there will require supplementary feeding. We are now working with the Ethiopian Red Cross Society to finalize plans for the major food-aid operation it hopes to start next month in Oromiya and Somali regions.

Praying for Rain - the story of Ute-Muda Garero

Ute-Muda Garero has 12 children by his two wives, Makayi-Jiro and Abayo-Sorsa. Six boys and six girls. Tidy numbers.

“Are you a Muslim,” asks a visiting Ethiopian expert in animal husbandry.

“No, and not a Christian either. I believe in one god,” says Garero, 38, smiling with the deliberately ironic reference to monotheism.

“Do you pray?” says the expert, intrigued by Garero’s equanimity.

“Yes, and I pray for rain.”

It is would be burdensome enough raising 12 children in Dhuko – one of the Ethiopian Red Cross Society’s three critically drought-affected “peasant associations” hereabouts. The name is a Marxist legacy, meaning just a settled community in a woreda (district).

But adding to his worries is the knowledge that his herd of cattle have deteriorated to the exact mid-point of the official yardstick of animal health : between two and three on a four-point scale (another tidy number), four meaning near death.

Garero is the one of the few herdsmen who have stayed in Dhuko to sit out the dry season, fearful of getting mixed up in the tribal conflict over water and pasture he says bedevils the part of nearby Borena zone where hundreds of other men from the PA have temporarily migrated, seeking better grazing.

Only the women and children and a handful of community leaders and elders are left.



Ute-Muda Garero knows all about cattle-rustling. He’s one of the few pastoralist herdsmen who have stayed behind in Dhuko village, Oromiya, to sit out the dry season, fearful of getting mixed up in a conflict over water and pasture he says bedevils an area where hundreds of other men from the village have temporarily migrated, seeking better grazing. But his animals are suffering for it. They have already deteriorated to the exact mid-point of the official yardstick of animal health: between two and three on a four-point scale, four meaning near death.

“I pray for rain”

“My cattle will be ‘threes’ even if the rains start on time,” he explains, referring to the main seasonal rains due next month. “If the rains fail, they’ll die for sure.”

“What would you do then?”

“There’s not much we can do. We’ll have to depend on relatives. And aid.”

From a lack of resources, the Ethiopian government was recently forced to put Dhuko on half-time in its “safety net” of food-aid and cash handouts, which nevertheless includes some 6 million people across Ethiopia.

The ERCS is hoping to help fill the gap with food-aid distributions now being planned in Addis Ababa and locally.

For two years there has been no proper seasonal rain here – just the occasional torrential downpour that damages homes and crops and ploughs up the barely-passable 60-kilometre track to the nearest town, Hare Kello.

A little way short of Dhuko, an elderly Norwegian missionary and local legend, Jorunn Hamre, 77, apologizes for the small size of her congregation at the Mekane Yesus church, depleted by the same curse that has drastically thinned Dhuko’s population: drought.

“Things are really difficult here,” she says. “Food-aid is very necessary.”

It’s in Dhuko and countless thousands of settlements like it that the disaster in the Horn of Africa is hidden: difficult to see, even standing in the middle of it. But it’s there.

Children who look half their age from malnutrition; unnecessarily high infant-mortality statistics; “resource wars” fought between different tribes who might otherwise live in peace; the gradual erosion of an ancient lifestyle – pastoralism; in some places, like the centre of Ethiopia’s vast Somali region, the potential death of hope.

For the moment, the gods – be they one or many – seem to be against the pastoralists of Dhuko.

this story first appeared on ifrc.org and was written by Alex Wynter reporting from the Goro Dola, Oromiya region, Ethiopia.

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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:

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