【拓展阅读】Chronicle of a famine foretold

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The Horn of Africa
Chronicle of a famine foretold
Did the world react too late to signs of famine in Somalia?

Jul 30th 2011 | NAIROBI | from the print edition






ON JULY 27th, after days of toing and froing, the first aid flight at last landed in Mogadishu, capital of famine-hit Somalia. It carried 10 tonnes of plumpy nut, enough to reverse malnutrition in 3,500 children. The mission seems late. After the 1985 Ethiopian famine America’s aid agency set up a Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) to give warning of disasters. It has been forecasting a threat of famine in Somalia since November.

Famine has a technical meaning these days. It is declared when 30% of children are acutely malnourished, 20% of the population is without food, and deaths are running at two per 10,000 adults or four per 10,000 children every day. Parts of Somalia exceed these dreadful thresholds. In three provinces almost a third of people are acutely malnourished, says the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP). FEWS Net conducted surveys across southern Somalia this month and found that malnutrition exceeded 38% in most areas—a catastrophic rate. Famine is likely to spread all over the south in the next few months (see map). About 2.8m people are thought to need immediate life-saving help.




Yet famine was not declared until July, eight months after the first FEWS Net forecast. The UN did not issue its first appeal until then, though it made a small provision for expected problems in November. The response by donors has been patchy. In a sign of its growing global role, Brazil has pledged more to Somalia than Germany and France have combined. Italy offered nothing. Of the $2 billion the UN says the region needs, it has received less than half. The cash available for food in southern Somalia looks likely to run out well before the next rains.

Outsiders’ caution is linked to the role of the Shabab, an Islamist militia which controls much of southern Somalia and is locked in battle with the internationally recognised but feeble government. The Shabab has banned food aid in most of southern Somalia since 2009, branding Western aid agencies anti-Muslim. The WFP, the biggest provider of food aid, has had 14 staff killed there since 2008. Agencies also worry that militias use food aid to rally their troops—some say this happened in Ethiopia and Eritrea in the 1980s—and do not want to pile into southern Somalia to find they have reinvigorated the Shabab.








Still, things may be changing. One militant group recently said it was willing to let aid convoys in. Another then announced there had been no change in the prohibition and claimed the declaration of famine was a Western ploy to gain influence. Now, convoys are going in and the WFP has begun to move into Gedo, near the Kenyan border, where malnutrition rates exceed 50%. Some, but not all, parts of the Shabab seem to be looking for help.
The Islamists are not the only local rulers ambivalent about the onset of famine. Ethiopia’s government will never admit there is famine in the country: to do so would be to say it had failed since 1985. Both it and Kenya’s government have responded to public pressure slowly. Most of those affected are ethnic Somalis, nomadic herders and Muslims: marginal groups in both countries, with little political clout.
See our "interactive guide" to drought and famine in east Africa

Western donors and NGOs, too, could have done more. FEWS Net may have predicted famine but nothing happened until television cameras showed up, beaming out pictures of fragile children arriving at the huge Kenyan refugee camp at Dadaab in large numbers. Aid officers worry about being criticised by the public and their own bosses if they spend scarce resources before there is an outcry. The result is that donors often ignore their own early warnings. “We’re not behaving like good risk managers,” worries Duncan Green, the head of research at Oxfam.

Still, the response to the famine has not been a failure everywhere. In some areas, outsiders have learned lessons from the disaster of the mid-1980s. The drought in the Horn of Africa is probably worse now than it was then. FEWS Net says that it is the worst for 60 years, a once-in-a-lifetime event. The number of those affected—the UN puts the figure at 10.8m—is greater than in 1984-85, when about 8m were hit. In the worst-affected regions of Somalia, cereals prices are 260% higher than they were in 2010, comparable to what happened in Ethiopia, when grain prices in famine-stricken northern provinces in mid-1985 were about 300%-350% of their levels the year before.

The WFP says that 5,000-10,000 people could die of starvation in southern Somalia in August. If the famine lasts until the next rains, that means 100,000-200,000 could be at risk there: a dreadful toll. But 1m people died in the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85. The difference does not lie in the severity of the drought. It lies in what local governments and aid agencies have done to bolster people’s resilience to it.

For the past few years the Ethiopian government, the WFP and others have been running hunger-relief programmes which give out not only food aid but seeds and help to turn wasteland into productive acres. The result, says Josette Sheeran, the WFP’s boss, is that “we have one-third the number of people suffering from the emergency than we might have done [in Ethiopia].” Kenya has kept its school-meal programme running in the drought-stricken areas, so families know their children will get at least a meal a day. In 1984-85 famine ravaged the Karamoja region of eastern Uganda, which shares the same dryland climate as Somalia and Ethiopia. It might well fall into famine again this year. But Karamoja has had a lot of “food aid-plus” projects and so far is not on the WFP’s list of places in emergency need. Ungoverned Somalia has few such projects. A lucky few tramp hundreds of miles to food-distribution centres. Most remain under the control of jihadists, at risk of starvation.

Quite apart from the death toll and the misery, this is criminally wasteful. When famine threatened Niger in 2005, the cost of help was put at $7 a head. No one did much; the famine struck; the cost of help ended up at $23 each. Economic incentives and early-warning systems say donors should act early. But the political incentives advise delay—until it is too late.

from the print edition | Middle East and Africa

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If we could compress the world's population into a village of 100 people, 50 would suffer from malnutrition and 1 would be near death.  You are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week...
                                                                                ----------David J.Smith/Shelath Armstrory

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Food and agriculture
How to feed the world
Business as usual will not do it

Nov 19th 2009 | from the print edition

     

Alamy

IN 1974 Henry Kissinger, then America’s secretary of state, told the first world food conference in Rome that no child would go to bed hungry within ten years. Just over 35 years later, in the week of another United Nations food summit in Rome, 1 billion people will go to bed hungry.

This failure, already dreadful, may soon get worse. None of the underlying agricultural problems which produced a spike in food prices in 2007-08 and increased the number of hungry people has gone away. Between now and 2050 the world’s population will rise by a third, but demand for agricultural goods will rise by 70% and demand for meat will double. These increases are in a sense good news in that they are a result of rising wealth in poor and middle-income countries. But they will have to happen without farmers clearing large amounts of new land (there is some scope for expansion, but not much) or using up lots more water (in parts of the world, water supplies are stretched to their limit or beyond). Moreover, they will take place while farmers also wrestle with the consequences of climate change, which, on balance, will do more harm than good to farmland round the world.

It may be too late to avoid another bout of price rises. Despite a global recession and the largest grain harvest on record in 2008, food prices are heading up again. Still, countries have a brief window of opportunity in which to set long-term policy goals without being distracted by panic measures. They need to do two things: invest in the productive capacity of agriculture and improve the operation of food markets.


Governments have done one but not the other. Over the past year investment has risen faster than anyone expected. But distrust of markets and a reaction against farm trade are growing. Unless governments restrain those impulses, they will undermine the gains from rising investment.

The quarter-century slumber

For most of the past 25 years, investment in agriculture has declined relentlessly. In 2005 most developing countries were investing only around 5% of public revenues in farming. The share of Western aid going to agriculture fell by around three-quarters between 1980 and 2006. This disinvestment laid waste to productivity. During the Green Revolution of the 1960s, staple-crop yields were rising by 3-6% a year. Now they are rising by only 1-2% a year; in poor countries, yields are flat.

Fortunately, the food-price spike of 2007-08 shocked governments out of their quarter-century of neglect. The World Bank and many rich countries have doubled the money they put into poor countries’ farming. In the poor countries themselves, agriculture has gone from being a sideshow for the government—something the minister of agriculture does—into its main event, which everyone needs to worry about. This is as it should be: farming is far and away the single most important economic activity in most poor places.

Some of the new splurge of public money is going on safety-net programmes for poor farmers, which are justified on anti-poverty grounds: three-quarters of the world’s poorest live in rural areas. But the money will pay dividends in the long run only if it improves farmers’ access to market. Lack of reliable markets is the biggest barrier to rural development, since without them farmers have little incentive to grow more. So the increase in rural road-building is welcome, as are measures to improve the operations of local markets by (for instance) spreading price information and building grain stores. There is also a case for temporarily subsidising better seeds and fertilisers in places where local markets are failing to provide them: this is an example of correcting market failure.

Boosting world food production without gobbling up land and water will also require technology to play a larger role in the next 40 years than it has in the past 40, when people have been more or less living off the gains of the Green Revolution. Technology means a lot of things: drip irrigation, no-till farming, more efficient ways to use fertilisers and kill pests. But one way of raising yields stands out: developing genetically modified (GM) crops that, for example, use less water. Here, too, public bodies can overcome resistance. GM crops may be more acceptable if they come from government institutes than big companies or if the seeds are given away, rather than sold (which may be why Monsanto is doing that; see article).

I’m not all right, Jack

There is, however, a danger inherent in all this government activity: the temptation of self-reliance. The food-price rise of 2007-08 made all countries worry about “food security”—quite rightly. But over the past year “food security” (ensuring everyone has enough to eat) has shaded into “food self-sufficiency” (growing it all yourself). Self-sufficiency has become a common policy goal in many countries (see article).

In itself, self-sufficiency is not bad. If poor countries have a comparative advantage in producing their own food, they should do so (and that will often be the case). The problem is that the new rhetoric of self-sufficiency coincides with a growing distrust of markets and trade. Grain importers no longer trust world markets to supply their needs. “Land grabbers” are snapping up land abroad to use for food production. Everywhere, governments are more involved in farming through input subsidies. In these conditions self-sufficiency could easily sprout protective walls.

That would be in nobody’s interest. As Europeans have demonstrated over decades, pursuing self-sufficiency above all else is extremely wasteful. Self-sufficiency would also lock in patterns of agricultural production just when climate change is affecting different parts of the world differently, making trade between them all the more important.

The food-price trauma of 2007-08 is persuading some countries to say that they need to divert part of their wealth to subsidise food so they can be self-sufficient and avoid future crises. But the demands of feeding 9 billion people in 2050 tell a different story: farming needs to be as efficient as possible. That requires markets and trade. Investing in agriculture is a boon; rejecting agricultural markets would be a disaster.

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“Don’t Play With Your Food!”
“Don’t play with your food!”, an apple globe


More on famine. More on the right to food. More human rights maps.

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