You'd think that with the
Ebola outbreak, the Syrian refugee crisis and the Nepal Earthquake we've had
enough gut-wrenching humanitarian emergencies for one year. But a fresh
crisis is brewing in the Horn of Africa and the cause is very familiar to
Australians: El Nino.
The warming
sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean – dubbed El Nino – is
causing dryer than usual conditions in eastern Australia. On Thursday the
Bureau of Meteorology warned its impact is likely to intensify in the months
ahead stoking the risk of drought and bushfire. This El Nino is so strong it
has been described as "Godzilla" and much of the country has already
experienced scorching October temperatures. But El Nino is also playing havoc
in the Horn of Africa. It has been blamed for the failure of crucial mid-year
rains across vast swathes of Ethiopia triggering what the United Nations calls
a "slow onset" emergency.
The number
estimated to be in need of emergency food assistance in drought-stricken regions
of Ethiopia has surged from 4.5 million to about 7.5 million since August. More
than 300,000 children are already severely malnourished and the UN warns that
15 million people could need assistance by next year. Food shortages are
set to worsen over the next six months as the El Nino event
keeps large parts of the country dry well into 2016. In neighbouring Somalia a
further 855,000 people are reportedly in need "life-saving
assistance" and the UN warns 2.3 million more people there are
"highly vulnerable".
It's only
four years since I witnessed first-hand how devastating drought in the
Horn of Africa can be. In mid-2011 I travelled to the Dadaab refugee
camp near Kenya's border with Somalia to report on the food crisis gripping the
region. The massive camp had been swamped by tens of thousands of destitute
Somali farming families desperate for food and water. I was shocked by how many
malnourished children were not receiving help.
In an attempt to highlight this I visited a group of newly arrived families
living in makeshift humpies on the outskirts of the camp and asked if
I could check the nutritional status of their young children. I did this by
measuring the circumference of the children's mid-upper arm – one indicator of
undernourishment.
Within a few
hours I had identified about a dozen badly malnourished children under five
years who were not receiving any medical treatment. It was frustrating
that better assistance was not available – if I could find these needy
children surely the international humanitarian system could? But the lack of
resources in the camp was symptomatic of the sluggish donor response
to the 2011 Horn of Africa food crisis.
That year
aid agencies issued warnings months in advance that drought-affected
communities were becoming more and more vulnerable. Yet the response was slow
and indecisive. Things got so bad that famine was eventually declared in parts
of Somalia. A report by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and
the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health found more than
260,000 died during the food crisis, the majority of them children.
It looks
like the trauma I witnessed four years ago is
being repeated. The Ethiopian government is responding to
the worsening food crisis but most international donors are yet to heed
the warnings.
"It's
like everything we witnessed in 2011 is coming back again," one frustrated
aid worker in Ethiopia told me. "How on earth are we going to feed
7½ million people for six months because the next harvest is not until
June? And how do we treat 300,000 kids with severe acute malnutrition? Not only
is there no funding but we haven't procured any food. Even if we had the money,
the food procurement pipelines are long and slow … so we've found
ourselves looking down the barrel of a gun – there's simply no money and
no food in the pipeline."
Images of
malnourished children and parched landscapes in the Horn of Africa are all too
familiar. The great Ethiopian famine of 1984 shocked the world and
even spawned a new style of celebrity activism with Band Aid in 1984 and
the Live Aid concerts in 1985. But Ethiopia is a very different
country to the one convulsed by famine in the mid-1980s. Like many other
African nations it has experienced years of rapid modernisation and rising
living standards.
Even so, the
combination of a burgeoning population – which has grown by more than 40
per cent to about 100 million in the past decade – and a critical
dependence on rain-fed agriculture means the country is still very exposed to
drought. Aid workers based in the Horn of Africa say they can already see a
trend towards weather extremes and are alarmed that its just four years since
drought triggered a major humanitarian crisis in the region. It underscores how
vulnerable the region is to the long-term effects of climate change.
"Parts
of the Horn of Africa are already some of the driest places on Earth and they
are likely to get dryer over time due to climate change," said
Robert Glasser, the former director general of aid agency Care
International. "We're seeing evidence of these changes already."
The looming
crisis in the Horn of Africa will put additional pressure on an international
humanitarian system that is already overstretched. Aid groups are grappling
with the enormous refugee crisis triggered by the Syrian conflict along with
major emergencies in South Sudan, Iraq, Yemen and the Central African
Republic. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea are struggling to rebuild after
the worst Ebola outbreak in history while in Nepal tens of thousands are still
homeless and dependent on assistance following April's devastating earthquake.
But
a repeat of the 2011 Horn of Africa famine must not be allowed. It will
test the generosity of wealthy nations like Australia. By Matt Wade
Sydney Morning Herald Illustration:
Simon Bosch
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