Somalia famine:
UN warns of 750,000 deaths
Some 750,000 could die in Somalia unless aid is stepped up, the UN warnsAs many as 750,000 people could die as Somalia's drought worsens in the coming months, the UN has warned, declaring a famine in a new area.
The UN says tens of thousands of people have died after what is said to be East Africa's worst drought for 60 years.
Bay becomes the sixth area to be officially declared a famine zone - mostly in parts of southern Somalia controlled by the Islamist al-Shabab.
Some 12 million people across the region need food aid, the UN says.
The situation in the Bay region was worse than anything previously recorded, said senior UN's technical adviser Grainne Moloney.
"The rate of malnutrition [among children] in Bay region is 58%. This is a record rate of acute malnutrition," she told journalists in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
This is almost double the rate at which a famine is declared.
"In total, 4 million people are in crisis in Somalia, with 750,000 people at risk of death in the coming four months in the absence of adequate response," the UN's Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU) says.
Half of those who have already died are children, it says.
Neighbouring Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda have also been affected by the severe lack of rain.
'Not short-term'Previous Major African Hunger Crises
- Niger: 2010 - Food shortages affect more than 7 million people after crops fail; 2005 - thousands die following drought and locust invasion
- Ethiopia, 2000: Three consecutive years of drought leave millions at risk, with famine declared in Gode, the Somali region
- Somalia, 1991-1992: Drought and war contribute to famine across the country; the US Refugee Policy Group estimates at least 200,000 famine-related deaths in 1992
- Ethiopia, 1984-1985: Up to one million people die in famine caused by conflict, drought and economic mismanagement
- Biafra, 1967-1970: One million die in civil war and famine during conflict over Nigeria's breakaway Biafran republic
But 20 years of fighting and the lack of a national government mean that Somalia is by far the worst affected country.
The UN-backed authority controls the capital, Mogadishu but few other areas.
Unni Karunakara, head of medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), says al-Shabab's restrictions on aid workers mean many people in Somalia cannot be helped - and says aid agencies should be more open about this when appealing for more money.
"The grim reality of Somalia today is we are not able to get to south and central Somalia, which we consider to be the epicentre of the crisis," he told the BBC World Service.
"What is needed is a better representation of the challenges that aid agencies, including MSF, face in delivering assistance in Somalia today.
At the scene
In a sandy clearing surrounded by leafless bushes, people queued up for help.
Food aid is reaching Kenya's Wajir district but not enough of it. The demand is overwhelming and so the religious leaders have to pick out the most vulnerable - only they are given the sought-after parcels of rice, sugar, beans, flour and oil.
Schools are supposed to be reopening this week but there will be many empty benches as some children are too weak to make the long walk to school.
"The children are demoralised and many will not go. Also the UN has reduced the school feeding programme and the children can't learn without food," said father of five Mohammed Abdulahi.
In Griftu hospital a mother lay beside her terribly malnourished four-year-old daughter. Listless and stick-thin Ahado was being fed through a tube. The nurses are hopeful that within a month she will be out of danger.
"On the ward we now have an average of six to 10 severely malnourished children each week. The numbers have gone up. The drought is still getting worse," said Doctor Kosmos Ngis.
"Even if we are able to get food and supplies to the main ports of Somalia, I think there is a real challenge in being able to deliver that assistance - what I call the 'last-mile' problem.
Some officials from al-Shabab, which has links to al-Qaeda, have accused Western aid groups of exaggerating the scale of the crisis for political reasons.
Tens of thousands of Somalis have fled their country to seek help.
BBC East Africa correspondent Will Ross says that even if there is rainfall in October or November, people will need food aid for several more months until the crops have grown.
"This isn't a short-term crisis," said UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia Mark Bowden.
In Kenya's Wajir district, just across the border from Somalia, health workers are reporting an increase in the number of malnourished children.
Weakened by the lack of food they are more susceptible to disease.
The drought is still taking its toll on the livestock - people living in the arid areas of Kenya depend on their animals for their livelihood and with no rain expected for several weeks the crisis is still deepening despite the presence of aid agencies, says our correspondent.
Author Thomas Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 for Schindler’s Ark, later made into the film Schindler’s List. His latest book Three Faminesexamines three historical famines and their causes.
(CNN) – Imagine if long-term drought were to strike a part of the rural United States, Wyoming say, or Montana.
There would be bank foreclosures as the price of cattle would fall because there was too many of them on the market, families would tragically lose their farms, and grocery lists would be trimmed.
But would people starve, actually waste away until their bodies began to devour themselves?
In Southern Somalia, Djibouti, parts of Ethiopia and in refugee camps in Kenya at the moment, up to 12 million people, basically half a Canada, are facing death.
In Somalia, the people already in crisis number about four million. Mothers, for example, are again making the Sophie’s choice of how to share the small resources of remaining food amongst their children.
And the tired old terms to explain it all are again repeated. The cause, we are told, is drought. The “caused by drought” formula is not only lazy journalism. We’ve heard that song sung so often in the past that it may now make us immune to the famine’s claim on us.
Certainly, drought is a trigger of famine. And global warming might be extending the length of droughts. But Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist famously said that no substantial famine has ever occurred in a liberal democracy. I believe Sen is right.
Famines occur in places where people are tyrannized over either by governments or, in the case of Southern Somalia, by private armies and militias. They occur in places where even in the lead-up years to famine, farmers are not always able to plant crops with security, without the likelihood that they might be confiscated, or that the village granary will be burned by armies, private and government.
Famines, above all, occur in places where people get by on a few food items. Though in the cities, including Mogadishu, Somalia, people might eat canned food and a range of other food, for farmers in East Africa, the normal foods are lentils and the bread made out of dhurra, millet or a grain named teff.
If the grain crop is destroyed by drought or locusts or undue human intervention, there goes the chief nourishment.
The coastal fishermen of Somalia are themselves reduced in what they can eat because the price of grain is escalating out of their reach. The semi-nomadic people who own cattle have a diet of milk and meat. The livestock die for lack of pasture, are stolen or have to be sold or eaten, and there goes life.
In liberal democracies, as much under pressure as they might be at the moment, if one food source is removed from us, we have the ability to turn to another. Not so for the 12 million the U.N. has declared in immediate peril of starving.
So the question arises: Why are people on Earth now, in the 21st century, still surviving on one staple — just as the Irish did with the potato in the 1840s?
Governments maintain unjust systems of land tenure, that is one reason. Governments put money into arms instead of into infrastructure — into roads, for example, by which aid can easily transported, or into storage facilities.
One is entitled to ask why, after all the development and emergency aid spent on Ethiopia, there is a food crisis there every time there is a drought? Is this a failure of rain or a failure of government?
We see the above-mentioned “undue human intervention” in East African people’s welfare in the fact that in the case of Southern Somalia, the Obama administration has had to give aid agencies a guarantee of freedom from prosecution even if some of the aid has to be given, virtually as a protection bribe, to the fundamentalist military group called Al Shabaab.
Al Shabaab has preyed on the Southern Somalis year after year. Charities must pledge their best efforts to prevent Al Shabaab from hoarding food and charging tax on it.
These realities of famine are as much, if not more, the cause of famine than natural disaster. In some cases it is misgovernment, and in the case of Somalia it is warlord-ism.
The question arises, should this reality stop us from coming to the aid of our fellow world citizens in East Africa? In my opinion it makes it more urgent.
As the old aid song from the 1980s goes, “We are the world.” In the meantime we’ll only learn to understand and address this deadly phenomenon if we stop citing “caused by drought” every time something like this calamity comes to our notice.