MALNUTRITION: HORN OF AFRICA: Poor Attention to Forecasts to Blame for Famine in Somalia

NAIROBI, Jul 21, 2011 (IPS) - By Isaiah Esipisu

 Children from families displaced by the drought line up to receive food at a feeding centre in Mogadishu. Credit:Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

The world had an opportunity to save thousands of lives that are being lost in parts of Somalia due to the famine, if only the donor community had paid attention to the early warning systems that predicted it eight months ago.

"The situation would not have been this bad if there was emergency response for prevention, despite the conflicts in the country," said Anna Ridout, Oxfam’s spokesperson.
The United Nations declared a famine in south Somalia on Jul. 20, following the two-year drought in the country, and the high child mortality rate due to the lack of food in the region.
According to the U.N., the southern part of the country hosts 310,000 acutely malnourished children at the moment. At the same time, nearly half of the population in Somalia is threatened with the famine. In some regions, at least six out of 10,000 children under the age of five die daily.
The death rate is three times higher than what the U.N. Children’s Fund defines in a famine, which is two people per 10,000 per day.
According to Oxfam, the U.N. announcement, which is the first one in the region this century, should be a wake-up call to the rest of the world.
"There has been a catastrophic breakdown of the world's collective responsibility to act. 3,500 people a day are fleeing Somalia and arriving in parts of Ethiopia and Kenya that are suffering one of the driest years in six decades. Food, water and emergency aid are desperately needed. By the time the U.N. calls it a famine it is already a signal of large scale loss of life," Oxfam said.
The organisation said that emergency aid was vital now to avoid people dying in massive numbers.
"Whenever there is an indicator of such a disaster, we must not only sit and wait for the emergency response. We can conveniently invest the funds by putting irrigation systems in place, vaccinating people, especially children, against anticipated diseases, and creating proper infrastructure to be used in case there is need for food supply," said Ridout.
Speaking from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, Ridout said that refugees arrive daily and in huge numbers from Somalia. Nearly all the children are malnourished and women are weak and wasted after trekking for days in search of water, food and a chance to live.
"They tell of horrible experiences of children who died along the way, and even adults who drop along the way because they cannot make it to refugee camps, mostly in Kenya or Ethiopia," she said.
The most affected areas in south Somalia include the Lower Shabelle, Middle and Lower Juba, Bay, Bakool, Benadir, Gedo and Hiraan.
The effects of the drought were made worse by the Al Shabaab militia group, which had blocked donor agencies from operating within its territories in 2009 – now the famine zones.
"We are praying that the October rains expected in the East African region do not fail. Or else, we are likely to have a crisis in the area due to the looming drought," said Ridout.
However, despite the drought in northern parts of Kenya, Somali refugees keep arriving at various refugee camps on a daily basis. In June alone, 68,000 Somalis arrived in Kenya and 54,000 in Ethiopia searching for food and livelihood. At the moment, U.N. records indicate that 1,700 and 1,300 Somalis are arriving daily in Ethiopia and Kenya respectively.
According to Mark Bowden, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, 300 million dollars is required to scale up the emergency response for the 3.7 million people in need in the next two months.
One of the biggest setbacks for food aid distribution has been Al Shabaab. However, the extremist group recently lifted its ban on international aid agencies.
"We have security advisors on the ground. But most important, humanitarian organisations in the country are already working closely with local community-based organisations to access people in need," said Bowden.
"We are also involved in dialogue (not negotiation) with all community-based organisations, including groups like Al Shabaab, to ensure that there is cooperation for the aid to reach those who need it," he added.
However, despite the challenges, humanitarian agencies have already put in place response mechanisms. In an effort to reach more children with life-saving interventions, the U.N. and its partners have scaled up emergency nutrition, water and sanitation, and immunisation efforts to combat malnutrition and reduce disease.
"We have already started airlifting urgently-needed medical, nutrition and water supplies into the worst-affected areas," said Bowden.
Compared to previous famines, the current situation in Somalia compares or exceeds those reported during recent years in Niger (2005), Ethiopia (2001), Sudan (1998) and Somalia (1992). However, this is the most severe food security crisis in Africa since the 1991/92 Somalia famine, according to the U.N. Between January and June this year, 300,000 people in Mogadishu were given food assistance by humanitarian agencies on a monthly basis. Approximately 100,000 malnourished children were treated through some 418 nutrition centres in south Somalia from January to May 2011.
The U.N. further reports that 93,000 people received shelter, especially in Mogadishu, where the majority of those displaced by the drought fled to from other parts of the country.
The current crisis in Somalia is expected to have an increasingly devastating effect on other countries in the region. However, generally, the Horn of Africa has 11.5 million people in crisis, including the 3.7 million in Somalia.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56574

MALNUTRITION: Niger: Between two seasons of hunger

PHILLIPPE LATOUR Feb 23 2011

 A woman collects water for her family’s animals in Gadabeji, Niger. Here the grass is meager after a drought killed off the past year’s crops. Aid groups warn 2011 will be another difficult year. (Sunday Alamba, AP)


Despite the large-scale response to the nutritional crisis from Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and other aid organisations, tens of thousands of children suffered from malnutrition in Niger in 2010. Despite better harvests, 2011 also looks set to be a critical year.
Around 100 years ago the father of Salouf Kina (80) founded the small village of Gueza, three hours' drive east of Zinder, the former capital of Niger. "He took his cows to a new grazing ground and decided to settle here with his family. There was plenty of greenery and water here at the time. I've always lived here, but last year [2010] was the worst I've seen", he says with a faltering voice.
Today Gueza, with 2 000 inhabitants, is a patchwork of mud huts built along sandy streets, where the odd tree provides some rare shade. In the surrounding area a few scrubby fields of millet left over from the recent harvest give the hills an air of neglect.
Kina's son, Aboukar, who is more than 50 years old, is also a neighbourhood chief and tells of the lean period that the inhabitants of Gueza experienced in 2010: "At the end of 2009 the harvests were very bad and some families harvested nothing at all because of the drought. When people's stocks ran out and they could no longer borrow, they had to leave the village -- young men at first, to go and work in Nigeria, then whole families. Between May and September more than half the village fled, leaving behind only women, young children and the elderly," he says.
"We're a long way from everything and few people are interested in us. If MSF hadn't set up a feeding centre at the health centre, all of us would have left and the village might have died completely."
Gueza's Integrated Health Centre is one of the few concrete buildings in the village. There are few consultations and MSF has packed up its outpatient nutrition education and rehabilitation centre for cases of severe malnutrition.
It is hard to imagine that three months ago some 300 children were treated by the MSF team here. It is the young Mamane Bashir, the centre manager, who greets me.

Malnutrition exacerbated by malaria
"The rains came very early this year and the malnutrition situation was exacerbated by malaria, which hit the weakest children. Last August we treated around 600 children, compared with just a hundred or so in August 2009. This is also linked to MSF's presence, which ensured that the medicines and therapeutic foods didn't run out," says Bashir.
In Zinder and Magaria, the main towns in this region of Niger, at the end of December, there were still some 200 children in the intensive hospitalisation centres set up for the serious cases of malnutrition. However, these facilities -- rows of beds under large tents -- now seem relatively empty. At the height of the nutritional crisis, in August and September, more than 800 children were treated there, the majority of them on the brink of death.
Kelima, 32 years old and a mother of four, took her youngest child, Djamilou, aged 15 months, to the Zinder centre in early December. The MSF doctor diagnosed him with severe anaemia combined with malaria. After being given a drip and then fed therapeutic foods, he gradually gained weight. Two weeks later he is smiling and waving his hands when spoken to.
"Soon we'll be able to go back to the village" says Kelima. "But this year, it was really too difficult to feed the children; there were only a few handfuls of millet for the whole family."
"Unfortunately, 2010 was the year that broke every record," says Dr Moïse Moussa Gabrial, head of the Magaria centre. "Since January 2010 we've seen more than 6 200 children. At the end of August, we had around 500 hospitalised children. We had planned to recruit and train medical staff, but the situation was so bad that we had to hire people locally and train them on the job.
"At the height of the malnutrition crisis, 280 people were working for MSF at the intensive malnutrition centre. And tragically, we saw the deaths of many children -- 133 in September alone -- who had arrived in a desperate nutritional state and were often suffering from malaria."

Fighting famine
However, 2010 was also the year of unprecedented mobilisation to fight famine in Niger. The government, born of a coup d'état at the beginning of the year, made food security one of its central causes and called upon international organisations to help.
A number of organisations provided extensive support for care facilities and implemented large-scale prevention strategies, based on appropriate food supplements, making it possible to limit the damage.
"We dare not imagine what would have happened if no one had rallied to help," says Patrick Barbier, MSF's head of missions in Niger." But what worries us today is that despite some good harvests at the end of 2010, 2011 still risks being a very difficult year, in a context that remains one of extreme poverty, often combined with a lack of access to care.
"In nearly all the country's regions, families are heavily in debt and must now, after the harvest, pay back three or four measures of millet for every two borrowed. Added to which, many families' livestock assets have been reduced from a whole herd at the start of the year to just a few goats and sheep. International organisations and aid agencies must remain extremely vigilant and prepare to intervene on a large scale again in 2011."
In Gueza Kina's grandson and Aboukar's son has just turned 20 and already has the face of an old man. In a few days he will set off for Nigeria to sell tea in the street so that his family can survive in the village and keep the hope alive that life there is still possible.
http://mg.co.za/article/2011-02-23-between-two-seasons-of-hunger/

MALNUTRITION: AFGHANISTAN: Government stockpiling wheat ahead of expected drought

  Photo: Akmal Dawi/IRIN 
Wheat is the most important food crop in Afghanistan

KABUL, 26 January 2011 (IRIN) - Up to 500,000 tons of wheat will be stockpiled in different parts of Afghanistan in anticipation of a mid-level drought later this year, with the aim of assisting vulnerable communities, stabilizing food prices and preventing shortages, officials told IRIN.
“We plan to store 500,000 tons of wheat - sufficient for 10 percent of the population for one year - in our strategic reserves,” said Majeed Qarar, a spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL).
About 75,000 tons of wheat (surplus from 2010 domestic production procured by the government) is already in “strategic stockpiles” and 250,000 tons will be imported from India in line with a deal signed in 2010, he said. Afghanistan may have to look elsewhere, however, as India, which has its own food security concerns, could soon impose another wheat export ban.
The Afghanistan National Disasters Management Authority (ANDMA) said it was discussing drought mitigation plans with government and non-government bodies and UN agencies.
“We need to act pre-emptively and must be prepared to meet the humanitarian consequences of the drought,” Mohammad Daim Kakar, director of ANDMA, told IRIN, adding that a humanitarian appeal would be discussed with aid agencies next week.
A joint emergency appeal was launched by the Afghan government and UN agencies in response to the 2008 food price and drought crises. Millions of vulnerable people were assisted.

Little rain
Afghanistan has had little or no snow or rain this winter, which bodes ill for the country’s agriculture, the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) has warned.
Agriculture is the main income and livelihood source for over 60 percent of the population.
“Though major food shortages will be avoided if regional trade flows function normally, increased food insecurity and above-average food assistance needs are likely, especially during late 2011 and early 2012,” FEWS NET said in a 20 January food security alert.
Drought and conflict will worsen the humanitarian situation significantly
Below normal precipitation is forecast only in the northern parts of the country from February to April, according to the International Research Institute for Climate and Society.
Traditionally, Afghan farmers use rain and glacier-melt runoff during the autumn to prepare land for winter wheat cultivation.
Over 60 percent of domestic cereals are produced in irrigated fields which are dependent on snow melt, springs and other local water sources. About 35 percent of the wheat, meanwhile, comes from rain-fed fields which need adequate rainfall from February onwards, MAIL said. Production is not focused on one particular region but dispersed across the country.
MAIL’s Majeed Qarar sounded a note of caution: “We don’t want to sound the alarm bell on drought prematurely because this could panic rain-fed farmers.”
Only 22 percent of the population have access to improved drinking water and a drought would create water shortages and exacerbate water and sanitation problems in the country, ANDMA warned.

Conflict makes things worse
Any deficit in cereals will be more evident in the country’s south and southeast where conflict-related humanitarian needs are already paramount, said Qarar. “In the north and northeast, we hope, cereal production will be good.”
In the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, which normally get 180-200mm of rain in January-February, no rainfall had been reported by 26 January, provincial agriculture officials said.
“Everyone anticipates more fighting here [Kandahar] in 2011,” said Sardar Mohammad Niazman, head of the Afghan Red Crescent office in Kandahar. “Drought and conflict will worsen the humanitarian situation significantly.”
Aid agencies such as the UN World Food Programme plan to distribute food aid to 7.8 million people in 2011, according to a Consolidated Appeals Process launched by the UN and NGOs in December 2010.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91736

MALNUTRITION: CHAD: Moving the aid spotlight west

DAKAR, 20 July 2010 (IRIN) - Eastern Chad is well known as one of the most challenging settings for emergency relief in the world due to the spillover from Sudan's Darfur conflict and internal strife, but far less attention is being focused on western regions where 1.6 million people are facing crop failure and food shortages ahead of the October harvest, according to WFP and the government. Food prices in the west are at least 35 percent higher than the five-year average, according to the US Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), [http://www.fews.net/pages/country.aspx?gb=td&l=en] and there are major logistical challenges in terms of food aid delivery. "Now that we are entering the rainy season, it will become extremely difficult to reach remote populations," said the director of the National Food Security Office, Ali Adou Djorou. "We tried to preposition stocks before the rains as much as possible, but we will still face major problems with getting food to where the people are." Importing food into the region is costly and time-consuming and trucking routes even from neighbouring Cameroon are arduous. "Everything needs to go through the congested port of Douala [in Cameroon]. Operations to bring in assistance for refugees [in the east] and affected populations [in the Sahelian belt] are competing. It easily takes four to five months for food to reach beneficiaries in Chad," said World Food Programme (WFP) deputy country director Moumini Ouédraogo. "Historically, the focus has been on [internally displaced people] and refugees [from neighbouring Darfur]," said the head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Chad, Ute Kollies. "There are some 70 organizations responding to needs in the east, but this is a different operation, requiring a different expertise." Logistics and funding delays are slowing the operation down, he said. In the absence of established NGOs, WFP had to mount food distributions itself in the central regions of Batha and Guéra in early June. "We usually work with implementing partners, but when it was time to distribute, there were none," said Ouédraogo. "NGOs are now arriving and will conduct the next food distribution [from now to the end of August in western regions]." WFP short of food WFP has received less than one-fifth of the 46,000 tons of food it says is needed to prevent hunger from worsening before the next harvest. In late 2009, the government, UN agencies and FEWS NET reckoned 80,000 tons of cereals were required to cover the needs of the affected population. The government has made 32,000 tons of cereals available at subsidized prices. Local procurement could also have been quicker, "but countries are not always willing to export their products," said Ouédraogo. In May, the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS) called on governments not to impose barriers on regional trade in cereals, stressing that overall cereal production in the Sahel and West Africa had decreased by only 2 percent compared to last year's harvest. "The advocacy has worked," said Ouédraogo. "If we secure more funds, we now have been told that we could buy in Nigeria. [The transportation from there] should take between a month and 45 days." For the first time, WFP was able to buy 1,000 tons of beans from Burkina Faso this year. But some in western regions cannot wait that long. People are starting to leave their homes in search of food, said OCHA's Kollies. "We have already seen some 600 people moving from their place of origin to Moussoro [in the eastern region of Bahr El Gazel] where they wait for support. We are looking at a possible displacement due to hunger."

MALNUTRITION: Definition of term "Famine"

JOHANNESBURG, 13 May 2010 (IRIN) - Aid agencies and donors have warned of the possibility of a famine in Niger, evoking images of the last food crisis in the Sahelian country in 2005. Some media organizations have already pronounced the current crisis a famine. So, what exactly is a famine? "There is no clear boundary or definition [of a famine]," said Christopher Barrett, a food aid expert who teaches development economics at Cornell University, in the US. "Clearly, 1984 in Ethiopia was a famine [a million people died and an estimated eight million were on food aid]; equally clearly, 2009 in the United States was not [the US Department of Agriculture said on average 33.7 million Americans received food vouchers each month in 2009, the highest number ever]. Barrett said the typical explanation of a famine was "greater than usual mortality that is caused by insufficient availability of or access to food, whether directly due to starvation or far more commonly, indirectly, due to disease or injury associated with severe under-nutrition." Stephen Devereux, author of Theories of Famine, a definitive reference book on the subject, noted that dictionary definitions such as "extreme scarcity of food" described a "few symptoms of famine" and selected some factors to "suggest causes", but failed to provide a "comprehensive and concise" definition. "A good working definition of famine must describe a subsistence crisis afflicting particular groups of people within a bounded region over a specified period of time," he wrote. Hundreds, if not thousands, of researchers, academics and humanitarian aid workers have tried defining it. Devereux quoted an academic as saying that "Famine is like insanity: hard to define, but glaring enough when recognized." Why defining it is important? Controversy has dogged the application of "famine" to several recent humanitarian emergencies: Sudan in 1998, Ethiopia in 1999/2000 and 2002/03, and Malawi in 2002. In an influential paper in 2004, Devereux and Paul Howe, both researchers at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, proposed a scale to measure famines. "Both before and during these [African] crises, observers failed to agree on how serious the situation was, or how serious it was likely to get," they commented.
The search for a definition is not merely a technocratic or instrumentalist concern - it has political significance A dire lack of food in Niger in 2005 prompted another debate: using their scale, Devereux and Howe pronounced the situation a "famine", while pointing out that the international community used "less emotive terms, like 'food crisis'." This could possibly have been under pressure from the government at the time which did not acknowledge the crisis. Defining famine is not "merely a semantic issue - these controversies have important implications for famine response and accountability", and a lack of consensus over the definition has delayed interventions and the distribution of resources during a crisis, Howe and Devereux wrote. They cited the 1999/2000 food crisis in Ethiopia as an example. "The contentious issue here was that of scale: because the emergency was confined to a single region [Somali in eastern Ethiopia]", aid agencies avoided the "F-word", saying the term should be saved for very severe situations. A retrospective mortality study suggested that aid agencies had responded late in drawing people into relief camps, "where communicable diseases such as measles spread rapidly, contributing to an estimated 19,900 deaths in Gode zone alone [in Ethiopia's Somali region]", Howe and Devereux said. The 1984/85 Ethiopian famine was another tragic example of donors responding only when people started dying. "In the light of this 'No corpses, no food aid' myopia (not to mention callousness)," Devereux said in his book, he had to agree with Alex de Waal, the British writer, author of Famine Crimes: politics & the disaster relief industry in Africa and researcher, "who concludes pessimistically that there is no good definition on which to make a diagnosis of impending famine." The search for a definition is not merely a "technocratic or instrumentalist concern - it has political significance", Howe and Devereux noted in their 2004 paper. Who do you hold accountable for the deaths from a famine? Governments and agencies [among] whose job[s] it is to prevent famines "have often exploited the ambiguities in the term to contest whether a famine has occurred, thereby evading even limited accountability for their action - or inaction." Accountability, even after [an estimated] 70,000 deaths related to a famine in Sudan in 1998, took the "'soft' form of internal agency evaluations and lesson-learning workshops". Most definitions of famine had centred on a lack of food, but in the past 25 years the thinking on food security has shifted to the link between poverty and vulnerability rather than low food production, Barrett wrote in a paper. This stemmed directly from a "pathbreaking" book by economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, published in 1982. Sen's "famous opening sentences underscore that 'starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes'."
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=89121