Madagascar Famine Looming

Food and Agriculture Organisation says 330,000 people in Madagascar are on verge of ‘a food security catastrophe’ following sustained drought that has decimated crops with agencies warning last month that nearly 850,000 people are experiencing “alarming” hunger levels. More than 50% of children suffering from stunted growth, a condition caused by malnutrition over the first 1,000 days of life.

Dominique Burgeon, director of emergencies and rehabilitation at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said, “People go from one lean season to the next, resorting to negative coping strategies. People are eating anything to fill their stomachs, selling most of their belongings, cattle and land. It shows the severity of the situation and the need for us to act.”

Farmers talk of the earth changing; of failed rains and crops, and barren land.

“People are living under extreme conditions. We are dealing with a development crisis that has lasted for decades now, worsened by El Niño. For many, it is day-to-day survival,” said Elke Wisch, country representative for Unicef Madagascar. “Worst case is another crop failure,” said Wisch. “Then you are looking at – and we’re starting to see this now – people eating seeds instead of planting them. That is a desperate situation.”

Somalia's children in need

The United Nations has warned that over 58,000 children would starve to death in Somalia if they are not provided with urgent humanitarian assistance. 

UN aid chief for Somalia Peter de Clercq said that more than 300,000 children under the age of five are acutely malnourished. The UN official also said that they urgently need medical, food, and other humanitarian support.

"The level of malnutrition, especially among children, is of serious concern, with nearly 305,000 children under the age of five years acutely malnourished," the official said, adding, "We estimate that 58,300 children face death if they are not treated."

The UN has said that nearly one million people are struggling every day to meet their food needs. 4.7 million people, or nearly 40 percent of Somalia, stand in need of humanitarian aid.

The grim assessment comes as severe drought continues to hit several regions in the impoverished war-torn country. Northern Somali areas are especially hard hit by the ongoing drought. The drought has been exacerbated by by an exceptionally strong El Nino weather pattern.

"The food security and malnutrition situation in Somalia is alarming, especially in parts of Puntland and Somaliland, which have been hard hit by drought exacerbated by El Nino," the UN said in a statement, adding "We are deeply concerned...with severe drought conditions intensifying in Puntland and Somaliland, many more people risk relapsing into crisis."

The UN has appealed for urgent support and humanitarian assistance. The world body is calling for USD 885 million in aid to assist people in conflict- and disaster-affected regions.  

Too Little, too late - again

Almost one million people out of Namibia’s 2.3 million population face moderate to serious levels of food insecurity. One-third of the population lives on less than $1 a day, and Namibia ranked 120 out of 187 countries on the 2012 UNDP Human Development Index. Malnutrition is the second-most common cause of death recorded for children under five, even in non-drought years. And with the onset of this year’s drought, an estimated 109,000 children under five are at risk of acute malnutrition.

The Namibian government in May estimated this year's harvest would yield 42 percent less than 2012. "Namibia still does not feed itself, and the middle-income classification comes from livestock, mining and fisheries industries - [this] does not provide an accurate situation on the ground," Cousins Gwanama, head of the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Namibia in Windhoek, told Al Jazeera. 

Japhet Iitenge, director of the Disaster Risk Management office, said "Our needs start with food to feed the people. It is the ultimate goal to provide food and water for both animals and people, but there are other needs to avert the suffering of our population."

Farmers across the country wait for food rations and for the international community to take the situation more seriously. In May, Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba was forced to declare a state of emergency and requested $33.7 million in international support to avert a crisis.  Algeria donated $1m in food aid but the reaction from the rest of the international community has been poor. Without people dying en masse and absent images of decaying cattle skeletons across the sand, the world is unlikely to respond Namibia's desperation anytime soon.

Mukaokondunga Tjikundi says the family have no expectations of receiving help from anyone. "We are just collecting wood, selling them, trying (to survive). We have no expectations of government, of anyone, because you can never know when the help will end."

"Given that we are human beings, we wait for that moment when people start dying," said International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ Jack Ndemena, water and sanitation officer. "But this is a situation that can be arrested. We can try to help now in order not to go to that extreme situation when people start dying."

Famine - it need not happen

Up to two million people are estimated to have died in drought-related emergencies since 1970.


“Where there are normally successive failed rains; then you have a process whereby you have subsequent harvest failures then people adopt coping strategies," explained report author Rob Bailey. "They start selling off assets, running down food reserves, taking on credit - they get themselves into an increasingly desperate situation." After a period of time the coping strategies become exhausted, triggering a famine. The whole process can take 11 months from start to finish, and that is why there is an opportunity to intervene early. "Yet despite this very significant opportunity and despite analysis showing that when you do intervene early it costs less and you save more lives, it does not happen. Ultimately, early action requires government action."

"It requires donor governments - like the UK and US - to write a cheque early on before the crisis is at its worse phase, and that is a big ask for governments to do because governments are primarily concerned with managing the political risks to themselves.
The 2011 famine in Somalia was probably the single most documented and monitored evolution of famine in history. But still no early action happened. Early warning systems were first introduced in the Sahel and Horn of Africa regions in the early 1980s when it was first realised that it was possible to track the "chronology of famine". Things have got a lot more sophisticated so now there are early warning systems that use satellite to estimate harvests more effectively, how much pasture is available. We have more much more sophisticated weather forecasting models.They also use a lot more household-gathered data, where infants are weighed and malnutrition is quantified. Also, it is monitored whether certain coping strategies, that are recognised as pre-famine indicators, are becoming established. It is very rare that you can have a risk that can be so well understood and predicted, and give us such an opportunity to intervene and mitigate it.
Drought-related emergencies, particularly in the Horn of Africa and Sahel regions, are unlikely to go away in the future, projected scenarios show.


Taken from here

Somalia's drought was man-made

 Global warming may have contributed to low rain levels in Somalia in 2011 where tens of thousands died in a famine, research by British climate scientists suggests.  Between 50,000 and 100,000 people died from the famine.

 Peter Stott of Britain's Met Office said that the evidence is "very strong" that the planet is warming due to an increase in greenhouse gases. He noted that the study indicates that both natural causes -- La Nina and the short rains -- and man-made causes contributed to Somalia's drought. Between 24 percent and 99 percent of the cause of the failure of the 2011 rains can be attributed to the presence of man-made greenhouse gases, Stott said.

Global warming is caused by the burning of fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas -- which sends heat-trapping gases, such as carbon dioxide, into the air, changing the climate, of which the contribution of Somalian people is negligible yet they bore the brunt of the consequences.

same old story - yet another famine

No sooner had the U.N. announced Somalia's famine was over and another hunger crisis looms.

Last year, around 13 million people in the Horn of Africa needed food aid. Now aid agencies warn failed harvests in the Sahel mean 12 million more people require assistance.

The Sahel, the band of desert and scrub that runs south of the Sahara, stretches, west to east, from Senegal to Mauritania, Mali Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. Mauritania, a country that is three times the size of Arizona but has the smallest volume of potable water of any nation in the world, is one of the worst affected. A third of its population is already at risk of hunger.

The primary cause is a drought last year described as the worst for decades by the U.N. As a result, food prices have doubled or tripled, while the price of livestock — often the main store of wealth in the Sahel — plunged as pastures turned to desert and the animals began dying of thirst. Nor are such instances of failed rains isolated. A 2011 study by the Center for Forestry at the University of California, Berkeley, found rainfall in the Sahel has almost halved since 1954. In a region already poor and sparsely governed, the drought has intensified competition for food and water, and violent unrest — like recent intertribal battles over cattle in South Sudan — is rising. Northern Mali is currently the scene of a Tuareg rebellion, as is northern Nigeria, where an Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, is waging a campaign of bombings and assassinations against the state.

In a grain storage near Gaet Teidouma, stock manager Jeddou Ould Abdallahi looks helplessly at the few remaining sacks of cereal stacked against the whitewashed walls. There is no way they will feed hundreds of people in surrounding villages until the next harvest in September. "We are on the brink of a famine," he says.

"Within months, people will begin to starve unless we act," warns the European Union's humanitarian-aid commissioner, Kristalina Georgieva.

Johannes Schoors, country director of aid organization CARE in Niger, laments: "Certain donors still want to see dying children before they make available funds. We need to tackle the underlying causes of food insecurity; otherwise, we will face a crisis every year. But who can afford to finance that?"

Scoors is correct. Capitalism cares only for those with economic importance. Only socialism cater for peoples needs

Droughts don't inevitably mean famine. While they may set the conditions for starvation, only human beings ensure it. The world has more than enough food to feed itself.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2106546,00.html?xid=newsletter-europe-weekly

Drought is nothing new

Socialist Banner adapted this from here .

No rainfall has hit some places in months. Hundreds of dead bodies can be found on the roads every day; this suggests that people, particularly the young, are abandoned to their fate. The Horn of African is experiencing a great tragedy. However, it should be noted that the cycle of violence in the region and ongoing conflicts have destroyed the infrastructure, thereby exacerbating the impact of the drought. The tragedy is human-made rather than an outcome of natural causes. It is mostly attributable to ongoing wars waged over artificial disputes.

The political systems of Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia that remain as legacies of colonial times, and the colonial relations between African nations and Western powers including the US, had in the past reserved their budgets for arms purchase, leaving people to live in abject conditions and suffer from malnutrition and lack of healthcare and infrastructure. Imagine countries where Kalashnikovs are sold freely in markets, but you would not be able to find decent food in the same markets. It is almost impossible to convince Somalia, currently suffering a severe civil war, to reserve funds for construction of infrastructure rather than the purchase of arms.

Drought and food shortages are not new in the Horn of Africa. The people in this region constantly experience such crises. There have been more than 50 food and drought crises in the region since 1984. It should be recalled that the amount of monies spent once the crisis broke out is far more than the funds needed to prevent such a crisis. It is easy to blame the political administrations for their failure to take prior measures despite already being aware of the causes and repercussions of the drought, but this is the reality.

Eating cattle-feed and dirt

In Madagascar 70 percent of Malagasy live below the poverty line. In the affected areas 300,000 children younger than five were at risk of severe acute malnutrition if action was not taken, said Bruno Maes, UNICEF's country representative. Around 90 percent of Madagascar's children did not have access to clean drinking water at home, and "Just over 50 percent of children are stunted as a result of chronic malnutrition," he said. "This rate is among the highest in the world - the situation is only worse in Afghanistan and Yemen."

About 720,000 people are facing food insecurity after a third successive year of adverse weather and an increasing "decapitalization" - selling off livestock and possessions as a survival measure - of the rural economy in the south.

"...we know people have already started adopting negative coping strategies such as eating their own seeds, and foodstuffs which are damaging to their health, and selling their goods... men are migrating from these areas, leaving women and children even more vulnerable," Krystyna Bednarska, WFP's country representative, told IRIN.

John Uniack Davis, country director at CARE International, which works to reduce poverty, said anecdotal evidence from the affected regions was that cattle normally selling for US$250 in the post-harvest period were priced at $62.50 in the lean season, or were being bartered for 250kg of cassava, rather than the usual price of 450kg. He told IRIN that decapitalization was being used as a coping strategy and "households are being stretched to the limit."

In parts of Madagascar's drought-prone south people have resorted to eating cattle-feed with many eating red cactus that is usually given to cattle, or tamarind mixed with water and earth.