Southern Africa - severe drought warning

 

‘Southern Africa is currently in the grip of its worst food crisis in decades, with more than 27 million people facing severe hunger due to the impact of a months-long drought, the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) said.

The drought, which is attributable to the El Nino weather phenomenon, has ravaged crops, killed livestock, and left entire communities without sufficient food supplies, creating what WFP spokesperson Tomson Phiri described as a potential “full-scale human catastrophe.”

During a press briefing in Geneva, Phiri highlighted the urgency of the situation, stating “the need for action has never been clearer.”

“This is the worst food crisis in decades,” the WFP spokesperson said.

Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have declared national disasters because of the drought, while Angola and Mozambique are also severely affected. The WFP estimates that around 21 million children in the region are now malnourished, exacerbating an already dire situation as communities face soaring food prices and dwindling resources.

The WFP has outlined plans to provide food and cash assistance to more than 6.5 million people across the seven hardest-hit countries until the next harvest in March. However, the states have so far received only 20% of the $369 million they require.

The drought, which the US Agency for International Development described as the most severe in 100 years during the crucial January to March agricultural season, has wiped out vast swathes of crops. This crisis has caused food prices to skyrocket, which has exacerbated the challenges facing vulnerable communities.

In addition to the food crisis, the drought has had other far-reaching consequences. Zambia, which relies heavily on hydroelectric power from the Kariba Dam, has faced severe power blackouts as the dam’s water levels have dropped dramatically. In April, Zimbabwe, which shares the dam with Zambia, declared a national disaster in response to the crisis, which it described as the worst in 40 years.’

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.”

The famine which isn't a famine

 The ongoing war with Boko Haram that stretches across Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon has displaced 2.6 million people, both within national borders and across them. It has also left 6.3 million without enough food. The lack of food is the cumulative impact of three years of lost farming seasons, or of crops and livestock left behind, or looted. It is a consequence of towns and villages cut off by fighting, preventing people from leaving or food from coming in.

For the UN to declare a famine, 20 percent of families in a state or province face extreme food shortages, over 30 percent of the population, must be acutely malnourished and hunger causes two out of every 10,000 people to die every day. For those in north-eastern Nigeria not quite meeting the formal definition of famine, it is nothing short of a disaster.

Médecins Sans Frontières alerted the international community of a “catastrophic humanitarian emergency” in June, they were encountering rates of malnutrition and mortality rates in young children that were consistent with famine conditions in newly accessible towns. About 2.1 million people in Nigeria remain completely cut off from any external assistance because of the conflict. We don’t know what their conditions are like, but the conditions in these newly accessible towns raise grave concerns. People still in inaccessible areas are hardly going to cultivate their way out of hunger: even if people could plant crops, the next harvest is more than 12 months away. So aid supplies and the populations we suspect are in the greatest need remain cut off from one another.

We don’t currently have a defined famine in the Nigerian north east, but it’s hardly the point. We have 65,000 people already experiencing famine conditions, people cut off by violence and more than a million people with severe hunger, and we’re only meeting a fraction of the need.

http://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/2016/10/north-east-nigeria-man-made-hunger/

Ethiopia's Man-made Famine

Ethiopia is a large country (385,925 sq. miles), with a population of just over 101 million (13th largest in the world), which is growing at a yearly rate of around 2.5% (over double the world-wide average). The government proudly boasts that the Ethiopian economy has been growing, by between 7% and 8%.More than half the population live on less than $1 a day; over 80% of the population live in rural areas (where birth-rates are highest) and work in agriculture; the majority being smallholder farmers who rely on the crops they grow to feed themselves and their families. Nevertheless Ethiopia still finds itself ranked 174th out of 188 countries in the UN Human Development Index. This suggests that whatever ‘growth’ the country has achieved, it has not changed the lives of the majority of Ethiopians. It is evidenced by the millions suffering from hunger and malnutrition, has clearly not eradicated food insecurity.

Millions of the poorest, most vulnerable people in Ethiopia are at risk of starvation. Elderly men and women, weak and desperate, wait for food and water; malnourished children lie dying; livestock, bones protruding, perish. According to a statement issued by the World Food Programme (WFP), over 10 million of the most vulnerable require urgent humanitarian assistance. This does not take into account the seven and a half million people who annually receive cash or food from Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme taking the total in need of humanitarian food aid to almost 18 million. The worst affected areas, according to USAID, are the pastoral areas of Afar and Ogaden Region – where people rely totally on their livestock – and the agricultural lowlands of East and West Haraghe – close to the capital Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia – where millions rely on food aid every year – exports food. Since 2008 the government has been leasing huge amounts of fertile agricultural land to so-called “foreign investors’’: international corporations, domestic agents, fund managers, and nations anxious to secure their own future food security. In 2011 it was estimated that 3,619,509 hectares of land have been transferred to investors. and is sold with the understanding that it is cleared of everything – including people, by government forces. Indigenous people (who have lived on the land for generations) are displaced and herded into camps – the universally condemned ‘Villagization’ programme. Over a million people have been affected. Industrial size farms have been built and foodstuffs (not eaten by the native population) grown for export, – to the investor’s homeland – India, for example. Very little, if any, of the food grown is going into the Ethiopian food market, and there are attractive government incentives in place to ensure that food production is exported, providing foreign exchange for the country at the expense of local food supplies. The NGO Oakland Institute found that these commercial agricultural investments, by national and multi-national companies “increase rates of food insecurity” in Ethiopia, and that, despite “endemic poverty and food insecurity, there are no mechanisms in place to ensure that these investments contribute to improved food security.”

It is the poor who die of hunger-related causes throughout the world; it is the poorest people in rural Ethiopia – who constitute some of the poorest people on Earth – who are currently at risk. Every day 35,000 children in the world die of starvation and its attendant causes, but we live in a world of plenty; there is no need for a single man, woman, or child – in Ethiopia or anywhere else – to die because they do not have enough food or water to survive. Oxfam reports that the world now “produces 17% more food per person today than 30 years ago. But close to a billion people go to sleep hungry every night.” And they all live, more or less, in seven countries: India, China, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan.

Adapted from here

Same old story

At least six million children in Ethiopia face critical food shortages as a result of the worst drought in 50 years, Save the Children warned. The number of Ethiopians without enough food is rising as the drought intensifies in the African country with children particularly vulnerable.

The drought-affected area is vast with a population of about 30 million affected - with more than one-third in need of emergency food assistance. The region has now suffered three failed growing seasons in a row since mid-2014. More than 14,000 pastoralist families have been on the move since July, looking for work or clean water supplies.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt, chief executive of Save the Children said, "Thousands of children are at high risk of malnutrition and waterborne diseases. Families are on the move, desperate to find food and water. We have all the right early warning systems in place to prevent potentially enormous human suffering, but what use is early warning if the international community doesn't come forward?"

Habiba, a mother of seven children from Bekato, said she has suffered along with her children because of the crisis. Six of her children became sick and were being treated. "There was no milk, food, or water as the well had dried up. Can you understand as a mother what it is like to see six of your children so ill?"

Layla, mother of four-year-old girl Malou, said she's worried after her daughter was diagnosed with pneumonia.  "We came here from our village. We had to walk six hours on foot to come here," Layla said. "This is the longest drought I have ever seen."

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.  

South Sudan - Famine Warning

The United Nations says over 2.5 million people in South Sudan are on the brink of famine amid the destructive civil war in the country.

UN emergency relief coordinator Valerie Amos issued the warning on Monday during an international donor conference in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, where the world body launched a 1.8-billion-dollar aid appeal.

The UN official referred to “the continuing widespread devastation and destruction,” in South Sudan and called for restoration of peace in the war-torn country.

According to the UN, 2.5 million people – about 20 percent of South Sudan’s population of 12 million -- are in a state of emergency or crisis, only few steps short of famine. More than half of the country’s population are in need of aid.

The UN predicted that the conflict would worsen in the dry season when military vehicles could move around more easily.

Amos, who has recently returned from a three-day visit to the African country, added, “The conflict has had a devastating impact on South Sudan but if peace doesn't come quickly, it will also have a significant regional impact.”

Kenya's Drought and Food Shortage

In 2003, Kenya was among the 53 African countries who signed the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme to accelerate growth and reduce mass poverty, food insecurity and hunger in Africa by allocating at least 10 percent of their national budget to agriculture. Oxfam International statistics show that only nine countries have met this threshold. In the 2012/13 financial year, the agricultural budget was 3.6 percent of the national budget, far below the 10 percent threshold. To bridge the gap, there has been an increased donor participation in the agricultural sector, according to ActionAid International Kenya. Yet the ministry of agriculture has been unable to utilise the funds; only 61 percent of its budget from the previous financial year was spent.

According to the regional Drought Management Authority, lower Mukurweini in Kenya has only been receiving 200 mm of annual rainfall, which has resulted in a dire food shortage. But Mukurweini is not the only region in the midst of drought and food shortages. Arid areas are the most affected, particularly Turkana County in Rift Valley Province, where half of the residents – about 400,000 people – are facing starvation.

The Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) says that in total at least one quarter of the 41 million people in this East African nation lack sufficient food and 1.7 million are under threat of hunger and starvation. According to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, aside from a few areas, no part of the country is food secure as this season’s harvest of maize – the country’s staple food – was not enough to feed the nation. The Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations says the country is short of about 10 million bags of maize and warned that the drought is expected to reach its peak in August.

Agricultural researchers like Professor Mary Abukutsa-Onyango have blamed an over reliance on rain-fed agriculture for the shortage. According to the ministry of agriculture, less than seven percent of cropped land here is under irrigation and the government’s plan to place half a million hectares under irrigation, particularly in arid and semi-arid areas, has not made sufficient progress.
Abukutsa-Onyango, professor of horticulture at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, told IPS that in the arid Turkana County for instance, “the Todonyang irrigation scheme project, which was launched in 2009 and was meant to put 12,000 hectares of land under irrigation for agricultural production to solve food insecurity in the arid North Eastern Province, seems to have stalled.”
It’s a sad development as last September, the government discovered an estimated 250 billion cubic metres of freshwater – enough to supply the country for 70 years - in Turkana County.

Abukutsa-Onyango added that there was also too much focus on maize as a staple crop.
“We are not growing other crops such as sorghum, finger millet, arrow roots, yams and bambara nuts as well as indigenous fruits and vegetables which can grow easily in many parts of the country, creating alternative sources of food,” she said. Although KARI received less than one percent of the national budget, the research institute has continued to release a variety of drought-resistant crops. But these have had low adoptive rates among farmers because, Abukutsa-Onyango said, “the cost of hybrid seeds is beyond the reach of most farmers.”

Food security expert Winnie Mapenzi told IPS that small-scale farmers, who produce three-quarters of the country’s food, have been unable to produce enough to feed the nation due to various challenges.
“They have little access to inputs and financial services, and poor infrastructure,” she said, explaining that this meant that smallholder farmers were unable to access markets to sell any surplus harvest. It also meant, she said, that they had “poor storage facilities which result in after-harvest losses.

War and Hunger - The Scourge of the Sahel

20 million "food insecure" people across Africa's Sahel belt, an impoverished area that includes Sudan and Central African Republic. An estimated 2.5 million people out of those affected need urgent humanitarian assistance just to survive. 5 million children under five years old are classified as acutely malnourished in the Sahel belt.

"The situation for countless communities across the region... is still desperate," the OCHA factsheet says. "People are highly vulnerable to disease and epidemics, and because health infrastructure is so limited, many people die of illnesses that they should survive."

UN Regional Humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel Robert Piper told the Reuters news agency that the region now faces "make or break time".

In south-east Niger, for example, a convergence of floods, droughts and conflict in neighbouring Nigeria means that people near the town of Diffa cannot grow enough food to get by.

While the Sahel belt often sees floods, droughts, locust infestations and epidemics, it has also been hit more recently by conflicts in several countries including Nigeria, South Sudan and Central African Republic. Across the Sahel, more than 1.2 million people have had to flee violence and insecurity, with most of them crossing into neighbouring countries as refugees where they place further strain on already limited resources.

From here 

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."

The Somalian Famine Toll

Nearly 260,000 people died during the famine that hit Somalia from 2010 to 2012, a study shows.


Half of them were children under the age of five, says the report by the UN food agency and the US-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network.

An estimated 4.6% of the total population and 10% of children under five died in southern and central Somalia. In Lower Shabelle, 18% of children under five died and in Mogadishu 17%.

"The report confirms we should have done more before the famine was declared," said Philippe Lazzarini, UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Somalia. "Warnings that began as far back as the drought in 2010 did not trigger sufficient early action,"

The number of deaths was higher than the estimated 220,000 people who died during the 1992 famine.

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.

No Money - No Food

 Just 15 per cent of its land is good enough to produce food or raise animals and now, for the third time in the past decade, drought has returned to Niger.

Aid agencies earlier this year revealed that tens of thousands of people died needlessly last year in the Horn of Africa because aid donors waited until people started dying to respond. Now agencies hoping to prevent a similar famine in the landlocked West African nation of Niger are having trouble getting aid donors to take notice. More than 5 million people in the Sahel region are facing famine and aid agencies want to move early before the dire situation becomes a crisis. Signs of the looming famine in the Sahel were first detected late last year - that is when aid organisations started issuing pleas for help.But selling the prevention message is never easy when there are not corpses to go with it.

 Denise Gibson, the World Food Program's country director in Niger, says the situation is urgent.
"What we've seen in over the past couple of months is a steady deterioration in the food security situation. The poorest people ... their situation is not getting any better, it's getting worse. People are still eating, they are eating wild leaves, they are eating wild berries, we don't want them to be eating that, but they are still eating," Ms Gibson said.

And when they run out of wild leaves and berries?

 Once again it is reported that there here is food in the markets in Niger, but people do not have the money to buy it.

In the predominantly rural economy, where 80 per cent of people rely on subsistence agriculture to survive, a succession of droughts has sapped the funds of most people. Oil has recently been discovered in the Niger and it is set to become the world's second-largest uranium exporter, but for the moment many of its people are struggling to survive.

When America and Al-Shabaab Agreed

When war-torn Somalia was also ravaged by a drought-induced famine last year, which killed tens of thousands and displaced over a million people, international media was quick to blame the Islamist Al-Shabaab for blocking humanitarian assistance from reaching its zone of control in southern Somalia.Although the group undoubtedly prevented assistance from reaching starving famine victims based on its claim that food aid was a Western conspiracy to drive Somali farmers out of business, Menkhaus, a specialist on the Horn of Africa, believes that was not the end of the sordid story. According to Ken Menkhaus, professor of Political Science at Davidson College in North Carolina, the United States’ counter-terrorism laws played an equally central role in obstructing assistance from reaching famine victims in desperate need of aid. Menkhaus said humanitarian organisations suspended food aid delivery to drought- struck areas controlled by Al-Shabaab for fear of violating the USA Patriot Act. Humanitarian groups were fearful that an accusation of "aiding terrorists’ could damage their entire organisation. In reality, the U.S. could have issued a waiver, protecting relief agencies from counter-terrorism laws; similar waivers have been issued for relief agencies in southern Lebanon and the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories, where Hezbollah and Hamas operate respectively. But in the case of Somalia, Menkhaus believes the U.S. administration did not want to give its Republican opponents any political leverage on the eve of upcoming presidential elections by appearing too "soft on terrorism". Instead, the U.S. government prepared a document that purportedly gave relief agencies protection from the law but which, upon close examination by legal experts, was found to contain no such protections, leaving those humanitarian agencies vulnerable to attack under the Patriot Act.

The tragic irony Menkhaus explained  "suspension of food aid into southern Somalia was the only thing that the U.S. government and Al-Shabaab could agree on, to the detriment of (millions) of Somalis" 




The humanitarian agenda is becomes secondary to the political agenda.
By 2008 Somalia was the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian aid workers. "One-third of all humanitarian casualties occurred not in Afghanistan or in Iraq but in Somalia," Menkhaus said. The Kenyan refugee camp of Dadaab, with a population of 520,000, is now Kenya’s third largest city, and completely unsustainable. In addition, destitute nomads and farmers who can no longer find livelihoods in rural areas are drifting into urban centres. These people, who come with no technical skills into a barren employment landscape, are forming huge slums of several hundred thousand people in villages that previous housed only a few thousand residents.


http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107508

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

Niger's Hunger

A national survey of vulnerable households shows that 5.4 million people face food insecurity across Niger. Women have been left in charge of many of the households in the village of Zamkoye-Koïra, in western Niger, as food shortages have driven male family members to leave in search of work elsewhere.

"The men have gone to look for a way to feed the women and children left behind in the village, because there was no harvest at all this year," 40-year-old Bibata Mounkaïla told IPS. "We've eaten only once a day for several months," the mother of eight said, in the midst of making a simple porridge out of sorghum that will have to satisfy her family for the whole day. "The situation also means that our children are no longer going to school - the nearest one is in a neighbouring village, three kilometres from here."

Poor rains resulted in a deficit of more than half a million tonnes of grain and a shortfall of fodder for livestock of more than 10 million tonnes. The vulnerability survey, carried out in December 2011, found that more than a third of the population of 15.7 million are in a position of food insecurity - 1.5 million will face severe food shortages.

According to Eric-Alain Ategbo, the chief nutrition expert for the United Nations Children's Fund office in Niamey, the Nigerien capital. some 330,000 children are facing severe malnutrition presently, and nearly 700,000 more face moderate hunger. "We have seen 20,000 cases of malnourishment across the country, with 5,000 new cases recorded each week (in medical centres)."

time to change the system

For the third time in seven years, the Sahel region of west Africa is facing a toxic combination of drought, poor harvests and soaring food prices. In Niger, 6m people are now significantly at risk, together with 2.9m in Mali and 700,000 in Mauritania.

Drought and famine are not extreme events. They are not anomalies. They are merely the sharp end of a global food system that is built on inequality, imbalances and – ultimately – fragility.

An immediate response is needed in order to avert a devastating food and nutrition crisis. In responding, however, we must also redefine the vocabulary of food crisis. It is our global food system that is in crisis. Last year's famine in the Horn of Africa, and the current woes in the Sahel, are the surface cracks of a broken system. These regional outbreaks of hunger are not, as such, extreme events.

The problem is not just about governance shortcomings in Africa, and it is not just about the modalities of delivering food aid. It is also a problem of principle. For decades, we have taken the wrong approach to feeding the world. In many poor countries, investment in agriculture has focused on a limited range of export crops. Too little has been done to support smallholders, who produce food for their local communities. Yet, by supporting these poor farmers, we could enable them to move out of poverty, and enable local food production to meet local needs.

Diverse farming systems, agroforestry and reservoirs to capture rainfall are sorely needed in drought-prone areas such as the Sahel. This requires a real commitment to local food systems, and an acknowledgement that trade and aid cannot provide all the answers, especially when international grain prices are so high.

We must plan adequately for the food crises that emerge within our broken food system, and we must finally acknowledge how broken it is. Only when we are honest about hunger will the world's most vulnerable populations receive the short-term aid and long-term support that they need.

So wrote Olivier De Schutter

But is his solution going to be socialism, the abolition of the market and its drive for profit? Socialist Banner sadly does not think so. No more eternal tinkering with the system . It is time to tackle the root cause of poverty and hunger which is the capitalism.

a capitalist failure

Thousands of needless deaths occurred from famine in East Africa last year because the international community failed to heed early warnings. Oxfam and Save the Children say it took more than six months for aid agencies to act on warnings of imminent famine.

"Many donors wanted proof of a humanitarian catastrophe before acting to prevent one," the report says. "Sophisticated early warning systems first forecast a likely emergency as early as August 2010, but the full-scale response was not launched until July 2011." By that time it says, "malnutrition rates in parts of East Africa had gone far beyond the emergency threshold and there was high profile media coverage of the crisis"

Between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. At one stage during the famine the United Nations estimated that 10 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance.

Oxfam's Chief Executive, Barbara Stocking said "It is shocking that the poorest people are still bearing the brunt of a failure to respond swiftly and decisively."

Save the Children's Chief Executive, Justin Forsyth, said clear warnings had been ignored. "We can no longer allow this grotesque situation to continue; where the world knows an emergency is coming but ignores it until confronted with TV pictures of desperately malnourished children"

its not drought and its not over-population

Macalester College geography professor William Moseley has conducted research into food insecurity and violence in the famine-stricken Horn of Africa and spoke to Minnesota Public Radio.

Moseley: I think you have to be very careful not to just assume that famine is a natural consequence of some meteorological event. I think a great comparison is in the U.S. In Texas and Oklahoma right now we're experiencing a terrible drought but we don't have a famine there because there are government programs in place to prevent that from happening.

Moseley: I think there's a lot of misunderstanding in the U.S., we've already discussed one, that this is a result of drought. I think a lot of Americans attribute this problem to overpopulation. I've argued elsewhere that many parts of Africa are not densely populated, including this area. There's about 13 Somalis per square kilometer, which is much lower density that what we're seeing in our own drought-stricken state of Oklahoma. Yet we tend to focus on the population issue, and I don't think that's what's really driving this issue

Moseley: Once we get beyond this crisis in the short term, we have to think longer term: How do we prevent this from happening again? The U.S. Agency for International Development has been very focused on increasing food productivity and through a new "green revolution" approach, so using improved seeds, insecticides, chemical fertilizers to increase food production. That may make sense in some areas of the world but I'm very skeptical of that working in the Horn of Africa. And that's largely because the poorest of the poor, the people who are hungry, don't have the resources to sustain that strategy. I think added on top of that, that type of approach is highly linked to energy prices, which are forecasted to keep increasing. What I favor is a much more locally focused approach, one that works on enhancing traditional techniques to increase food production.

Moseley: People have farmed grains in this area for centuries. One could try to enhance productivity through increasing use of manure to better fertilize their fields. Or to be mixing creatively different crops together that complement one another, so mixing legumes with grains, for instance — the legumes fix nitrogen and increase grain productivity. But one that is not so dependent on fossil fuel inputs from outside of the area.

Moseley: Since 2007-2008, when global food prices spiked, prices went up about 50 percent and for some commodities, like rice, they went up 100 percent. So in that period there were a lot of food riots around the world, especially in developing areas of the world. There's very much a concern on the part of the U.N. about social unrest, which is connected to food scarcity, high food prices. I'm skeptical of the way that's been framed. I'm skeptical of calling this social unrest "food riots." I think it gives an image of this violence spontaneously erupting, a bit like dog fighting over scraps of meat. I prefer to call them food demonstrations, because what the public is really upset about is government policies that have often resulted in these high food prices. I think there are people that want to bring the attention of their government to the fact that there are a lot of vulnerable urban people who are having trouble accessing food.

Moseley: ...I'm going to present a study that we published in 2010 in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on this social unrest that occurred in West Africa. What we showed is that you had policies through the '80s and '90s which were pushed on these countries by the World Bank for free market reform. What that meant is that they ceased to provide subsidies to their own farmers and they removed import duties on food that was imported. What you see during this period is a decrease in food production and an increased reliance on food imports. That was fine as long as global food prices were cheap, but global food prices have been rising since 2007. They spiked in 2007-2008 and they're spiking again in 2011. So you're exposing your population to volatile global food prices and that was a result of a series of policy decisions.

Full interview here