In 1984, when famine claimed the lives of millions in Ethiopia, the world said never again. But 27 years later, the spectre of death and destruction caused by chronic food shortages and conflict has returned.
More than 12 million people desperately need food aid in what the United Nations calls the worst humanitarian disaster to hit the Horn of Africa – northern Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.
Over 2.3 million children in drought areas are acutely malnourished according to the UN. Aid agency Oxfam says in some places 90% of the livestock has died.
And it will get worse. The disaster will continue to spread as the seasonal rains of October and November are not expected to arrive this year.
But as the world responds to the emergency with more food, money and political support, fundamental questions about the long-term ability of the region to feed itself have resurfaced. Why have billions of dollars in aid money been unable to prevent disaster striking again? And why were sophisticated early warning systems – designed to prevent food shortages from escalating into humanitarian disasters – ignored?
INTO THE ABYSS
One of the most important things to understand about the drought, says Luca Alinovi, senior economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is that locals have lost their ability to cope. “People are resilient, but their capacity to produce their own food and survive drought has been eroded,” he says.
Travelling through some of the hardest hit regions in northern Kenya, there is ample evidence to support this: tens of thousands, mostly from nomadic herding communities, are struggling for survival. Water no longer exists naturally in large parts of the dusty landscape. The fittest walk for days or weeks with what animals are left, to find ways to keep them alive. Those remaining eat whatever they can find in the baking desert surrounding their basic settlements in the bush.
“If I get a meal from well wishers, I cook for the children. If I don’t, we sleep hungry,” Fatuma Ahmed, a mother of nine living alone in Haberswin, a windswept settlement in north-eastern Kenya, tells Emerging Markets. “The children have stopped asking for food: they know the situation.”
In the past, they would have sold animals to buy food during the tough months, but all the animals have died. Meanwhile food prices have rocketed. According to the Kenya Bureau of National Statistics, a 90kg bag of maize, the primary food source for most Kenyans, jumped from around $16 in June 2010 to $44 this July.
Over half of Ahmed’s village has moved closer to the nearest town, Wajir, where they hope to find casual work. The plight of these pastoralist dropouts strengthens the idea that nomadic tribes in Africa belong to a way of life in terminal decline.
“It’s impossible to deny that these areas are getting drier,” says Vanessa Tilstone, who works for REGLAP, a consortium of charities working with vulnerable communities in dryland areas in East Africa.
Despite the best intentions of aid agencies and government schemes, attempts to ignore increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and transform drought-prone areas into fertile farmland are a waste of time.
“Calls for irrigation are misplaced,” she says. “There is a major water deficit, with not enough to even provide the basics for survival.”
Tilstone says there needs to be a sea change in the way governments and aid agencies understand the needs of communities living in drought-prone regions. To some extent pastoralists can be supported, but there also has to be a way for them to diversify their livelihoods.
“We need financial services, business training, linkages to markets and to cut out some of the middle men involved in selling goods who prevent the most vulnerable from profiting from their produce,” she says.
THE FAILURE OF AID
While Tilstone puts the recent crisis down to cumulative failures by policymakers to develop a system that works for pastoralists, others blame the aid agencies.
“Non-governmental organizations make food security worse,” says Kenyan economist and political commentator James Shikwati.
He says aid creates dependency, “turning people into beggars” and destroying local markets and the incentive for local farmers to produce food.
“We have a situation,” he says, “where some farmers have too much food, but the aid agencies aren’t buying it; they are bringing their own food, which sends the message to the farmer whose food is rotting today not to produce next season. That farmer who has an excess this season, next year he’ll be in the queue for food.”
Shikwati cites pictures circulated widely in Kenya in July of disgruntled farmers standing next to piles of rotting cabbages, while in other parts of the country people were going hungry.
The same has happened in Ethiopia, where farmers in fertile areas who have boosted production with improved seeds and fertilizer, often with the help of aid agencies, have been unable to sell their produce because bad transport networks and a lack of storage facilities mean they can’t get it to buyers.
Without aid agencies, Shikwati says, the Kenyan and Ethiopian governments would have greater incentives to invest in proper networks so that the country could feed itself.
“Until we fix the current system, it will carry on benefiting governments which make a profit out of contracts with aid agencies, and the poorest will continue to be poor,” he says.
Even some of the aid agencies are doubtful about how effective their role is – and how much can be done.
In September, head of Médecins Sans Frontières, Unni Karunakara, said there is only so much it and other aid agencies can do in Somalia, a country torn apart by conflict.
“If we are struggling, then others will not be able to work at all,” he said. “The reality on the ground is that there are serious difficulties that affect our abilities to respond to need.”
FROM THE BOTTOM UP
But others believe the challenges of operating in countries such as Somalia are surmountable and shouldn’t be an excuse to abandon vulnerable populations.
Alinovi believes such views have contributed to the crisis: “The international community has been using the fact that there is a political crisis as an argument not to invest in the people, which has contributed to why we are going through the current crisis.”
Alinovi says it is possible to operate in almost all parts of Somalia, provided organizations rely on local staff to carry out work in the field. “People defend an organization like ours in Somalia because we help them to help themselves, and I think we haven’t invested enough in that concept,” he says.
By taking advantage of Somalia’s existing business models, for example a sophisticated network of vets who operate across the country, Alinovi says the FAO has been able to roll out a variety of projects that offer genuine hope for the country’s future food security.
He points to the success of a scheme to develop local drought-resistant seeds, which has been running for five years in Somalia and has enabled producers in Lower Shabelle, one of the areas worst hit by the famine, to grow enough grain to feed themselves – and to sell some back to the FAO – providing food for 900,000 people.
With the right input, Alinovi believes Somalia could produce enough food to feed its own people, and become one of the top producers of food and livestock for export in East Africa. “Somalia already has a vibrant private sector. Last year they exported more than 4.5 million heads of livestock to neighbouring countries and the Gulf States – that’s an incredible amount of cattle,” he says.
Alinovi says boosting investment in Somalia should also enhance progress in other drought areas in the Horn of Africa: “There’s an interconnected reality between the three countries which is not given enough credit,” he says. “A lot of animals sold from Somalia to the Gulf come from Kenya or Ethiopia.”
He’s not alone in suggesting that recognizing the economic potential of pastoralism could be key to dealing with regional food security woes, especially if communities are helped to help themselves rather than being recipients of endless aid.
Maximo Torero, director of markets, trade and institutions at the International Food Policy Research Institute, says that there’s a lot regional governments and the East African Community (EAC) can do to bring communities in drought-prone areas into the fold.
“People confuse the current crisis and need for emergency food aid with the wider issue of ensuring food supplies and managing markets,” he says.
“We have to plan carefully to increase production and productivity. How much can be created in these areas depends on which instruments we use to improve overall food security.”
Simple improvements, such as building better storage for produce and helping herders take out basic insurance against their livestock, could dramatically reduce the impact of drought on communities. Building up regional grain stores could also help prevent central stockpiles of food from distorting the market, while giving communities more control over when and how they access reserves.
Most importantly, says Torero, building the capacity of the entire food network in the Horn of Africa and boosting cooperation and integration between governments would help the region wean itself off a dependence on outside help. “It’s not that Ethiopia and Kenya can’t grow enough food,” he says.
FUNDING FATIGUE
The question is whether there is enough appetite for change among regional governments and the international community. At a time of crisis, money and public sympathy are at their greatest, but it doesn’t take long for fatigue to set in and for attention to shift elsewhere.
“It’s hard to sustain interest,” says Alinovi, who says NGOs often rely too much on the shock factor of famine and disaster to attract funds.
Challenging long-held views about pastoralist communities and their place in society is also hard to do in countries fixed on modernization. In Ethiopia, there is a scheme in place to settle pastoralists into designated villages and put them to work on large-scale government and foreign managed agricultural projects – a clear message to indigenous tribes and nomadic herders in Ethiopia that their way of life is doomed. It also suggests to other governments that allowing pastoralism and herding to drop out of existence is the best option.
In the end, Shikwati says, it comes down to governments deciding where their priorities lie, which will have a knock-on effect on how aid agencies and the communities respond.
“In the long term, it doesn’t suit anyone to keep the system as it is or let disaster happen again, but how it develops depends on how important people perceive change to be,” he says.
The same goes for aid agencies, says Tilstone. No one is suggesting that funding should be cut off because the current model is broken, but understanding what has gone wrong will be an inevitable part of working out where aid and development fit into the future.
“We don’t have all the solutions now, but we’ve got to work with governments and communities to find a way to make things work,” she says. “These areas need massive attention and vision. To think that a bit of fundraising alone can prevent another crisis like this is misguided.”