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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Sat Jul 09 2011 - 16:55:51 EDT
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/africa/East-Africas-Drought-Brings-Triangle-of-Hunger-And-Questions-125268014.html
July 09, 2011East Africa’s Drought Brings Triangle of Hunger And Questions
Analysts and aid workers say a lack of proper forecasting, skyrocketing food
prices, marginalized populations, extreme poverty and insecurity have turned
the severe drought in East Africa into a humanitarian disaster.
The disaster response coordinator for British-based Plan International, Unni
Krishnan, is one of many among aid agency workers raising the alarm on the
severity of the current situation. "As we speak today, more than 10 million
people in East Africa are going through one of the worst crises in living
memory and this is one of the worst droughts in the last, more than 50
years. And children are in desperate need of food, nutrition, water and
other life-supporting mechanisms. We need to act now. The situation is very,
very bad," said Krishnan.
Aid workers say this year’s failed wet season has created a triangle of
hunger where the borders of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia meet. Parts of
Djibouti and Uganda have also been affected.
In Somalia, aid workers say the effects of the drought have been compounded
by rising food prices, estimated at more than 200 percent in the last year,
ongoing conflict, and nearly inexistent health systems.
It is estimated that one in three children in southern Somalia is severely
malnourished. Thousands of Somalis are reported to be fleeing into Kenya and
Ethiopia on a daily basis. Many of the drought victims were previously
displaced.
More than two million young children in East Africa are reported to be
malnourished, and a half million are estimated to be in need of urgent life
-saving actions.
For Krishnan from Plan International, it is a sad reminder that much more
needs to be done to prevent droughts from turning into disasters. “Droughts,
they are a recurring phenomenon in the region, so this needs long term
vision and long term responses. We are afraid that this response is not
going to be a 100-meter sprint, this is going to be a marathon race. It is
important to look at long-term disaster risk reduction measures, dealing
with issues of agriculture. There are new technologies that are in place
where agriculture is possible with limited water but unfortunately that is
not available for that part of Africa," said Krishnan.
Krishnan says dealing with conflict, poverty, the lack of infrastructure and
education are part of the solution.
Other aid workers stress more farmers should turn to resilient crops such as
millet and sorghum, and also install rain harvesting tanks and drip
irrigation schemes.
The co-author of a recent book about droughts, Eric Wood, from Princeton
University, has also been working with UNESCO, the UN educational,
scientific and cultural agency, on an experimental African drought
monitoring system.
He says once it is up and running, hopefully starting in December with a
base in Niger, the system could also be very important. “For central
governments, for regional institutions, for external agencies like USAID, I
think that they need to see large-scale patterns. What you may see at a very
local scale just may not be representative and so I think that is important
to offer a regional to continental scale. Our hope down the road is in fact
to combine the monitoring part with in fact a seasonal forecasting part.”
Wood says the system could forecast severe droughts up to three months in
advance, allowing for more effective disaster planning.
The forecasting could also help African farmers deal with increasingly
erratic rain patterns.
Currently, though, many aid workers, like Nicholas Wasunna, with the aid
group World Vision Kenya, are expressing enormous frustration. “We need to
do much more, especially in disaster risk reduction. We need to make
disaster risk reduction a political priority and invest accordingly because
these scenes we should never see again. The reality is drought will continue
to be with us, but we need to do much more, much sooner," he said.
Wasunna spoke from the home of an increasingly malnourished elderly man who
has been staying in bed all day inside his makeshift tent in northeast
Kenya, after the drought killed all his cattle.
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