An unfortunate mix of drought, failed harvests and rising food prices have brought severe food shortages to the east and the Horn of Africa. The severe food crisis is already affecting around 10 million people in parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia. Rains have failed over two seasons, with a strong La Niña event having a dramatic impact across the east coast of Africa. Now that this year’s wet season has officially ended, there is little prospect of rain or relief before September.
Charities have launched the biggest ever campaigns to tackle what they call a ‘creeping disaster’ in Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia. For Somali refugees arriving in neighbouring Ethiopia, rates of severe malnutrition are as high as 23%, according to Oxfam. A 4% incidence normally constitutes an emergency.
Up to 1,000 Somalis a day are also streaming across the Kenyan border to Dadaab, already the largest refugee settlement in the world, with 367,000 residents. Some 2.5 million people require food aid in Somalia, but access is tough, particularly in the south, where an Islamist insurgency has made it nearly impossible, for aid groups to operate. To the west, in Ethiopia, 3.2 million people require humanitarian assistance. Pastoralist communities there have seen 80% of their livestock die in some places, according to Oxfam, with the lost income making it extremely difficult for people to buy food.
In Uganda 600,000 people need assistance, and in Djibouti 120,000. But the greatest number of people in need, 3.5 million, are in Kenya’s arid northern regions, whose marginalisation by the government has magnified the effects of the increasingly frequent droughts. In Turkana malnutrition rates are more than twice the emergency level.
“High food prices, fluctuating rainfall, a rising population and ever dwindling natural resources have created the perfect storm,” said Leigh Daynes, director of communications for Plan, in the UK.
Aevia — Consider the Source