The Fate of South Sudan

More than 50,000 children in South Sudan face death from disease and hunger, the United Nations has warned. War has already killed thousands and forced more than 1.5 million people from their homes, and aid agencies warn of the risk of famine should fighting continue.

"Cholera has broken out, malaria is rampant and many children are malnourished. Millions of people need emergency healthcare, food, clean water, proper sanitation and shelter to make it through the year."   UN aid chief for South Sudan Toby Lanzer said. 

2030 - Poverty, Disaster and Climate Extremes

Hazards and vulnerability to poverty in 2030
Source: Overseas Development Institute

Wambui Karunyu, 72, and her seven-year-old grandson are the only surviving members of their immediate family.  Karunyu's husband and five children all succumbed to the hardships of living in the semi-arid area of lower Mukurweini district in central Kenya.

In 2009, a drought struck parts of central and southeast Kenya , leaving 3.8 million people in need of food aid. Four years later, conditions in the area remain dire. According to the regional Drought Management Authority, while the upper parts of Mukurweini receive an annual rainfall of 1,500 mm, lower Mukurweini only receives 200mm.

A new report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a U.K. based think tank, identifies Kenya as one of 11 countries most at risk for disaster-induced poverty. The report, entitled “The geography of poverty, disasters and climate extremes in 2030”, warns that the international community has yet to properly address the threats disasters pose to the poorest parts of the world.

The report includes locations where both poverty and natural disasters will likely be concentrated in 2030; and in many instances, these locations overlap.

However, the severity of disasters – such as drought, floods and hurricanes – depends on what “disaster risk management” policies the government has put in place, according to ODI.

In 2010, for example, the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti killed 11 percent of people who felt its tremors, while the Chilean earthquake – of an even higher magnitude, 8.8 – killed 0.1 percent; and in 2008, Cyclone Nargis killed 138,000 people in Myanmar , while Hurricane Gustav of similar strength killed 153 when it struck the Caribbean and the U.S.

“Slow-onset” disasters – such as the drought afflicting Karunyu and her grandson in Kenya – are often the harshest setbacks for development, especially in poor, rural areas that lack social safety nets, according to ODI.

“I plant maize and beans every season, but I harvest nothing. I never stop planting because I hope that this time will be better than the last time. But it's always the same, loss and hunger,” Karunyu tells IPS.

Simon Mwangi, a resident of Mukurweini and a service provider with the Dairy Goats Association of Kenya, an association of small-scale goat farmers, tells IPS that Karunyu's story is not unique.

“Life here is characterized by poverty and hunger. A great majority live in rural areas, and they are farmers. Due to prolonged dry spells, the situation is alarming, since they have no other livelihoods,” he says.

Mwangi notes that unreliable rainfall, frequent droughts and the inability of residents to adapt to harsh climatic changes has affected the growth of a variety of crops, such as maize and beans, which used to grow successfully.

“ Lower Mukurweini is no longer a corn zone, but farmers continue to plant maize with no success. There are drought-resistant crops that can do well here, including fruits, such as pineapples and indigenous mangoes. But the lack of extension officers has made it difficult for people here to adapt to the dry climate,” he says.

There is also a lack of NGOs and aid workers in Mukurweini to address the residents' plight. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) operated in Mukurweini for nine years, but left in 2011. “Things were much better when [IFAD] ran irrigation and trainings for farmers. Some sub-locations were doing much better, and there was food. But many parts of lower Mukurweini are now at risk of starvation,” says Mwangi.

Ten Worst Natural Disasters Reported in Kenya from 1980 to 2010. Source: United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction

In Kenya , each child born in a drought year is 50 percent more likely to become malnourished, according to the report. And from 1997 to 2007, less than 10 percent of Kenya 's poor escaped poverty, while 30 percent of Kenya 's non-poor entered poverty, partly due to the multiple natural disasters affecting the country.

In July 2012, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon assembled a team of 27 advisers to help him achieve the lofty goal of ending world poverty. Ten months later, the team – known as the High Level Panel of eminent persons (HLP) – produced a report that advised Ban, among other things, to “build resilience and reduce deaths from natural disasters” by a percentage to be agreed.

The HLP recommended this target on disaster-mitigation to be included in the post-2015 development agenda, a list that would replace the eight current Millennium Development Goals –which do not include the word “disaster” once.

The intensity of natural disasters is expected to increase with climate change. ODI predicts that up to 325 million impoverished people in 49 countries will be exposed to extreme weather conditions by 2030.

The regional Drought Management Authority says that Nyeri County , where Mukurweini is located, should expect more prolonged dry spells moving forward.

“During the day, you barely see anyone outside, it's too hot. Even the earth becomes too hot, you cannot walk barefoot,” says Mwangi.

“Without food or access to water, the elderly starve and fade away quietly,” he says.

When Poverty Quietly Morphs Into Catastrophe

By Miriam Gathigah & George Gao from here

Millions Of Ethiopians Flee Brutal Ruling Regime

Every year for a decade or more a million Ethiopians, 10 million and counting, have left, or fled, their homeland. While the television screens of the world have been flooded with images of North African migrants drowning off the Italian island of Lampedusa, the bones of tens of thousands of Ethiopian refugees lay in unmarked graves along Yemeni shores or at the bottom of the Indian Ocean or Red Sea.

How is it you might ask, that this 10 million human tsunami remains almost unknown to the world? And why, why would ten million Ethiopians, one in every 8 people in the country, risking their lives in many cases, seek refuge in foreign, mostly unwelcoming, lands?

The answer lies in the policies of the Ethiopian regime which have been described by UN investigators in reports long suppressed with words such as “food and medical aid blockades”, “scorched earth counterinsurgency tactics”, “mass murder” and even “genocide”.

Most of the Ethiopians refugees are from the Oromo nationality, at 40 million strong half of Ethiopia, or the ethnic Somalis of the Ogaden. Both of these regions in southern Ethiopia have long been victims of some of the most inhumane, brutal treatment any peoples of the world have ever known (it has been estimated that a full half of all Oromos were wiped out during the western supported Abyssinian Imperialist colonialization during the late 1800’s by the forefathers of “Emperor” Haile Sellasie).

These past few years saw the worst drought and famine in the Horn of Africa in 60 years yet almost all of Oromia and the Ogaden affected by this catastrophe were prevented from receiving food and medical aid by the Ethiopian regime.

What country in the world is allowed to expel both the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders during such a humanitarian crisis and not be roundly condemned by the international community? Only Ethiopia.

In Somalia alone the UN has admitted at least 250,000 starved to death during this famine with estimates for the victims in Oromia and the Ogaden running at least this high.

500,000 people starving to death in a couple of years and no outcry from the world? At one point up to 1,000 people a day, mostly women, children and the elderly, were dying of hunger and all we got was a New York Times best seller on the CIA’s “dirty wars” in the Horn of Africa which somehow failed to condemn this enormous crime.

Ethiopia remains the largest recipient of international, mainly western aid, in the world. Recently sources in Addis Ababa from within the offices of the IMF have sent word that Ethiopia’s import bill has reached almost 12 billion dollars a year while exports are only $2 billion. $10 billion a year in “aid”, “loans” or “investment” make Ethiopia entirely dependent on foreign good will to survive yet the world is helpless to prevent the enforced starvation of hundreds of thousand or over 10 million Ethiopians fleeing their country?

In the past ten years we have seen many reports on over two million Iraqi refugees and now another more than 2 million Syrian refugees. Yet more than twice this number of Ethiopian have become refugees and this fact remains unknown to the world?

When speaking of these crimes I am not speaking in the past tense for every day some 3,000 Ethiopians flee their homeland, almost 100,000 a month, another million or more this year. Many flee by boat from the shores of Somalia, heading for Yemeni shores and hopefully on to safer lands. How many boats sink with the loss of almost all onboard, or worse yet, have their passengers thrown overboard while still offshore will never be known. The international navies that patrol this region seem to care little for preventing the human trafficking mafias from carrying out their ghoulish trade, far to busy protecting the interests of the major shipping lines through these very same waters. Have you ever heard of a drone strike or commando raid on a human trafficking headquarters? Are any of these vermin trading in human misery ever listed on international “Most Wanted” bulletins?

Why should they, for the criminals ruling Ethiopia not only are allowed to continue business as usual but actually see their cash flow in the form of “foreign aid and investment” increased by a third since 2010 while at the same time hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians starve to death.

So next time you are confronted by images of lines of corpses along the shores of Italy remember that this is something that goes on almost everyday in the Horn of Africa but doesn't merit comment, let alone disgust and outrage by those most pious of commentators in the international media.

By Thomas C. Mountain from here