Read More: What Climate Change Means For Africa’s Food Crisis “I don’t know what it is that captures the imagination of the public.” While there were huge awareness campaigns for Darfur in the mid-2000s and Sudan in 2011, Maxwell says he doesn’t see any similar efforts for the region gaining the same sort of traction at the moment. Leir Professor in Food Security at the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University, and a member of the Famine Review Committee for Somalia, who has also worked for humanitarian aid organizations in Africa for two decades. “It has been, you know, third or fourth page news at best,” says Daniel Maxwell, the Henry J. The lack of awareness has surprised even longtime watchers of the region. I think there’s some awareness, but it has not triggered the kind of international response that one would expect, and is in fact needed.” There’s been plenty of warning from the Somalia authorities, from NGOs from others. Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator under President Obama. “This seems to be an invisible famine,” says Gayle Smith, CEO of One.org, and former U.S. has given over $700 million in aid to the region, more than the rest of the world combined. A recent poll of Americans aged 19 to 34 conducted by the IRC and YouGov found that almost 70% did not even know there was a drought in East Africa until they took the survey. One of its clinics in Somalia saw acute malnutrition cases rise eightfold in four months.ĭespite the precision and volume of the data, however, many Americans are unaware of the situation. According to the Climate Hazards Center, “crop harvests in Kenya, Somalia, and southern Ethiopia have been and will remain very poor, more than 9 million livestock have perished water resources have become extremely scarce.” In December of 2021 the International Rescue Committee (IRC) included Somalia on its annual watchlist, noting that the number of people in need increased 48% in a year. And the outlook for 2023 remains equally bleak. The warnings this time are not vague they’re supported by reams of data: sophisticated rainfall measuring technology from the Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station ( CHIRPS) is predicting that there will not be enough rain in Somalia and nearby regions for the next few months to successfully grow crops for the fifth season in a row, which has not happened since the group first started collecting data. Read More: Drought and the Ukraine War Are Pushing Somalia Toward a Catastrophic Famine ![]() ![]() The only two famines ever declared were in South Sudan in 2017 and Somalia in July 2011. Famine declarations are only made under extreme conditions: when a full third of a region’s children are severely malnourished, a fifth of the population has no access at all to food and there are two hunger-related deaths per 10,000 people each day. Many aid agencies believe that a declaration of famine is imminent. With enough awareness, the thinking was, there would be time to head off the worst ravages.įor several months now, that system has been sounding a major alarm about the situation in the Horn of Africa, which, after four failed rainy seasons over two years, is enduring the worst drought in recorded history, with no end in sight. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network or FEWS-NET, as it’s known, monitors such things as weather patterns, agricultural production, conflict and changes in humanitarian assistance, to give the wealthier nations and aid agencies timely information about likely crises. ![]() set up an early warning system for when a region’s food supply was going to fail. After a series of particularly devastating famines in East and West Africa in the early 1980s-the ones that sparked the Live Aid concert and set Bono on his path from rock star to humanitarian dynamo-the U.S.
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