New drought resistant seed to be distributed in Zimbabwe

Predictions are for more dry conditions for the upcoming planting season in Zimbabwe. The country has suffered many poor harvests in a row due to low rainfall. With all of the
successive small harvests,  Zimbabwe is now producing less food than it eats.

After a long debate over using genetically modified seeds, the lack of food as prompted action in Zimbabwe.  A new drought resistant seed for corn will be distributed this year. Farmers say that it is about time, but worry if will be cheap enough to afford.

From Reuters Alert Net, writer Madalitso Mwando describes the seed.

The Scientific and Industrial Research and Development Centre (SIRDC), in partnership with the University of Zimbabwe and Biotechnology Research Institute (BRI) has developed a drought-resistant variety of maize seed called Sirdamaize 113.

Farmers have had to wait between 150 and 180 days before harvesting their traditional maize crop, but the centre says the new seed takes only 136 days to mature.

Thomas Ndlovu, a smallholder farmer in Nyamandlovu, some 60 km (38 miles) from Bulawayo, said the new seed was welcome news, as he has lost his crop because of successive poor rains.

“This is what we have always asked for,” Ndlovu said. “My only hope is that this seed variety is affordable to us. We have for some time now been buying seed maize outside the country because the locally produced type is expensive.”

SIRDC says research into drought-resistant maize began more than a decade ago and has cost around $200,000. The centre’s current research forms part of a policy on food and nutrition security adopted by government early this year.

Already, more maize hybrids are being tested across the country as farmers prepare for the planting season.

This fresh commitment to scientific research could just a significant help in a country where smallholder farmers, who produce up to 70 percent of the country’s food, continue to face severe challenges from lack of farming inputs, absence of irrigation schemes and poor weather-forecasting techniques.

Extreme weather in rural Sri Lanka

With a "Super Storm" hitting the Eastern US right now, its a good time for a reminder of how hard extreme weather hits the poor. Throughout the weekend friends of ours who live in the Eastern US we sharing pictures of empty store shelves. The stores were emptied because people had the money to clear out all of their merchandise. They had the means to be prepared for the storm. Hurricanes that do hit our shores often hit the poorer countries of the Caribbean first.

A story we read today about rural Sri Lanka shows quite the opposite. Many families do not have the means to protect themselves from the storm. The only means they have of generating income through the crops they grow, often gets wiped out by floods and droughts. Writer Amantha Perera of the Inter Press Service interviews one family that had two years worth of income wiped out.

Gamhevage Dayananda, a farmer from the remote village of Pansalgolla in Sri Lanka’s north-central Polonnaruwa district, can attest to this reality, as he and his fellow farmers struggle to survive alternating periods of drought and flooding. 

Unexpectedly heavy rains in February 2011 forced engineers to open the sluice gates of large irrigation tanks in the area, flooding hectare upon hectare of farmland, including Dayananda’s modest plot.

He lost his entire rice harvest, no small setback for his family of four who depend on this crop for their very survival.

This year, Dayananda found himself facing another crisis when drought destroyed his crop and put him at risk of falling deeper into debt.

“One season it’s all rain, next it’s all sun,” Dayananda told IPS. “There is nothing in moderation, it is all in extremes.”

The trend of extreme weather events alternating year after year is unlikely to change, according to W L Sumathipala, former head of the climate change unit at the Ministry of Environment, adding that Sri Lanka is at the receiving end of changing climate patterns. 

Last year’s annual report for the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) noted, “Climate-related emergencies, such as those linked to drought, floods, and storms, expose the poor and most vulnerable to hazards that have lasting consequences for the health, livelihoods, and well-being of people who have the least capacity to cope with and mitigate the effects of natural disasters.”

Currently about 8.9 percent of this South Asian island nation’s 21 million people live below the poverty line.

Of these, according to Abha Joshi-Ghani, head of the World Bank’s Urban Development and Local Government Unit, “the poor in urban areas are likely to be affected more by the changing climate patterns. They are the most vulnerable because they live in sensitive areas, on precarious land where no one else will settle.”

The British-based charity Homeless International estimates that 12 percent of Sri Lanka’s urban population of about three million can be found in slums.

Defence and Urban Development Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa was recently quoted as saying that shanty dwellers in the capital Colombo can be found “mostly on government lands”.

“Many of them are on the reservations set aside around the lakes, canals, roadways, and railway tracks,” he added.

Helping herders in Kenya to survive drought

Meteorologists are forecasting more drought like conditions for Kenya and Eastern Africa again next year. Many people who live there have not recovered from the last one in 2011. In the efforts to help withstand the next drought, an NGO has found one solution can be found with the sheep and cattle herders in the region.

From the Guardian, writer Peter Guest tells us about the effort to help pastoralists.

"If they could get the business component, poverty is not a word you could use in Turkana," says Desterius Mulama, financial officer for Cezam and Associates, a Kenyan firm working with the US African Development Foundation (USADF) to improve food security.

Mulama moved to Turkana a year ago to work on the project. He is amazed at the scale of the herds in the region. "There is one old man who has 3,000 camels and 10,000 goats, but he walks barefoot," Mulama says. "If he sold just half of them, he would be a millionaire."

A government census put the number of goats in the county at around 5 million, with 1.5 million cattle. All across Turkana, herders carrying crooks pick their way through acacia trees, guiding huge flocks.

In many cases pastoralists still view animals as wealth and, even when the pasture dries up and there is no water, they will not sell them. The animals die and people starve. Building sustainable trading structures and introducing pastoralists to the cash economy should, Mulama hopes, ease them out of cycles of drought and food insecurity. "For pastoralists, our biggest challenge is to educate them on holding capacity," Mulama says. "Why should I hold 1,000 goats when I can only feed 100?"

Traders from Nairobi are starting to visit the markets in Turkana. Under Mulama's guidance, and with seed funding from USADF, the district livestock marketing council now has offices and computer equipment, and its staff have been trained in bookkeeping and other management disciplines so they will be able to build better commercial links with the rest of the country. A recent sale of 1,000 head of goats for export has raised hopes that the model may work.

Drought in Afghanistan threatens three million people with hunger

An already unstable country now faces the possibility of running out of food within three months. Afghanistan is now experiencing drought conditions and OXFAM is calling on donors to help. Rainfall has been sparse during last fall and spring rainy seasons. Last winter also brought little of any snowfall to Northern Afghanistan.

From Reuters Alert Net, writer Maria Caspani relays the appeal from OXFAM.

“Governments need to wake up to the gravity of this crisis and ensure they are ready to respond before the situation gets worse,” Asuntha Charles, head of Oxfam in Afghanistan, said in a statement.

Nearly three quarters of people living in the affected areas say they will run out of food in less than two months, Oxfam said.

“The drought has completely destroyed the wheat crop in some areas. People are reducing the amount of food they are eating and selling what little they have,” Charles said.

From Concern Worldwide: Keeping Moyale Out of Danger: Promise Amidst Disaster

By Kirk Prichard, Advocacy Officer for Concern Worldwide US  and currently based in Nairobi on emergency deployment

You see a lot of heartbreaking events unfold working in an emergency: malnourished children lying in “stabilization clinics”; once-proud pastoralists newly dependent on food assistance for their survival; scores of cattle carcasses littering the parched plains of northern Kenya; camels who have survived the harshest desert conditions for millennia uncharacteristically dying.

And though these images continue to upset me, it is the stories of success that move me the most. Stories like those that have emerged from the district of Moyale where Concern launched an early intervention in 2010 in response to the impending crisis it had been tracking for months.


Moyale is in the far north of Kenya, right on the border of Ethiopia and a few hundred kilometers from Somalia.  This is the exact region where the current drought has had its most devastating impact, killing up to 40 percent of cattle, which are the lifeblood of these pastoralist communities. Reports indicate that 80 percent of the surviving livestock have left the north entirely in search of pasture.  And it is now estimated that over 75 percent of the population in the northern areas is “food insecure” and in need of emergency rations.

Despite being located in the epicenter of the drought, Moyale tells a different story.   Statistics aren’t the best way to describe a very human tragedy, but they illustrate a compelling point.

For example, in Moyale, the rate of “global acute malnutrition” (GAM) among children under five is 13.7 percent: a threshold of 15 percent indicates a humanitarian emergency. In neighboring Marsabit and northwest Wajir, GAM rates are at 27 percent, almost double the international emergency threshold.

Simply put, children in Moyale are better nourished and thereby healthier and more resistant to illness and death than their neighbors.

What has made this difference in parts of Moyale, an area that has similar economic, agricultural and climate conditions as its neighbors?  Early indications suggest that it is in part due to disaster risk reduction programming and early interventions by Concern.

Almost a year ago (in October 2010), the first warning signs of a looming disaster in Moyale began to appear.  When these warnings were first issued, Concern’s nutrition team immediately got to work with a network of local partners to begin scaling up nutrition programs. They launched a large-scale “early intervention” to prevent the situation from deteriorating into a widespread catastrophe.

In other words, instead of waiting until large numbers of children became severely malnourished, Concern designed a program to prevent malnutrition levels from reaching emergency thresholds in the first place.
Here’s how it worked.

Concern worked with the Ministry of Health to hire and train over 120 Community Health Workers (CHWs): these CHWs traveled to the remote arid and semi-arid pastoral lands of Moyale to find and screen children at risk of severe acute malnutrition—children who showed signs of moderate malnutrition, but whose condition was not yet life-threatening.

The Concern-trained CHWs identified all moderately malnourished children that they found during the screenings and outreach, and admitted them into a supplementary feeding program, whereby they received rations of special highly nutritious food and were referred to health facilities for checkups. Concern also provided the families of these children with food rations. Concern’s intervention effectively prevented these children from becoming severely malnourished, and therefore more difficult—and expensive—to treat. Training these CHWs to screen and refer children for treatment cost just 25 USD per worker, and they are improving the lives of children in their communities every day.

In addition to training and providing technical supervision of Community Health Workers, Concern partnered with the Kenyan Ministry of Health to set up and provide technical support for 25 health clinics and approximately 20 outreach sites to improve health and nutrition coverage in communities throughout Moyale District and prevent malnutrition.  To date, among an estimated total population in Moyale of more than 55,000, Concern-supported nutrition services have screened 7,000 children and pregnant and breastfeeding women, and treated 4,190 for moderate acute malnutrition. Of those treated, 89 percent of children under five and 85 percent of mothers recovered and were “cured,” and there were no deaths.

The Concern-supported outreach sites were particularly important in these pastoralist communities because the population is nomadic, moving from place to place many times a year with their herds in search of water and pasture. Communities may seek help at a health facility, but then move on and be unable to return. Outreach services ensure that assistance reaches those who may not be able to access services in the same facility multiple times.

Concern also worked with local partner organizations to assist families with little access to food and at high risk of hunger. Concern and partners provided vulnerable families with livelihoods support, agricultural training and support, and education to boost their income and food security. This early, integrated, multi-sector response helped prevent the most vulnerable from tipping over the edge into crisis.

Investments in scaling up nutrition, preventing hunger, and improving the capacity of the poorest to manage their natural resources and improve their access to food have huge potential. Recent studies on undernutrition published in the Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal, and reinforced by the United Nations “Scaling up Nutrition” (SUN) Movement, provide clear evidence of the direct links between proper child nutrition and healthy physical and mental development. 

I am extremely proud of the work Concern has done in Moyale. But the fact that so many people in neighboring districts are facing extreme hunger is unacceptable: it highlights how much hard work remains to be done before we are able to scale up nutrition interventions to reach those at risk quickly and effectively. Investment in long-term development and emergency preparedness is a big part of the solution. We know that development and disaster risk reduction programs save lives—and cost much less than disaster relief. Early, integrated, multi-sector interventions that focus on preventing malnutrition rather than only on treating malnutrition are also vital. But despite their obvious impact and benefit, funding for these types of programs is quite scarce.

There is a saying that I’ve often heard here in Kenya: “Drought comes from God, but famine comes from man.”   The current crisis in the Horn of Africa has many underlying factors: dramatic spikes in food prices, extreme changes in weather patterns, severe drought, entrenched extreme poverty, lack of income opportunities, and poor water and health infrastructure. Regardless, in 2011, a regional food crisis affecting over 12 million people should not be happening. Preventing massive suffering from hunger and malnutrition is within our power—and it is our collective responsibility.

Armed Gangs take food aid in starving Somalia

In the almost government-less country of Somalia, the armed gangs that rule portions of the country are making a profit from the famine. Armed gangs step in to control makeshift refugee camps, in order to snatch up the food aid. The gangs then turnaround and sell the food on the open market. The food never reaches the starving that live within the camps. The armed gangs also prevent them from leaving, because then the food will stop arriving as well.

The Inter Press Service paints and drearier than usual picture of life within the refugee camps. Writer Abdurrahman Warsameh says that the people within these unoffical camps find no relief and no escape.

Since Mohamed Elmi, 69, and his family arrived at a camp for famine refugees in Mogadishu they have barely had enough to eat. Armed gunmen running the camp steal their food and prevent them from leaving to search for aid elsewhere, he says.

Elmi told IPS that this happens because aid agencies deliver food to the people running the camp for distribution and not to the famine victims themselves. And they are prevented from leaving because aid will no longer be delivered to the camps if they do.

"I don’t know who is running this, but we have said time and again that we are never, never given anything by the foremen running (the camp). Let them kill me if they want… We cannot leave here to find a better place," an emancipated Elmi told IPS. He asked IPS not to publish the name of his camp as he fears for his safety.

Tens of thousands of desperately hungry Somalis displaced from the drought-stricken south are not receiving the food aid meant for them. Gunmen have set up unathourised refugee camps in Mogadishu just to steal the food delivered by humanitarian agencies. It is believed the food is being sold on the local markets.

There are dozens of camps with thousands of families in the bullet-scarred Somali capital of Mogadishu. Not all are official camps. These are often run by men from the local clan militias who divert famine victims entering the city to the ‘camps’ they have set up in deserted buildings in Mogadishu.

This is what happened to Mahad Iyo, 54, who arrived in Mogadishu in search of aid in August.

Iyo said that he and other displaced people walked for days to reach Mogadishu. At the city’s entrances they were greeted by armed gangs and were directed to a disused government building. The building was filled with refugees who had constructed makeshift tents using sticks and old ragged cloth. "They want to use us for their own benefit," Iyo now says of the men who so eagerly offered him help when he first arrived. "We are not registered for the aid and neither are we given regular help. Food and other essentials are brought to the camp by the agencies but they are quickly taken away by the foremen," said Iyo.

Video: Waterborne diseases grip Somali refugee camps

couldn't resist... ;-)

Number of drought-displaced arriving in Mogadishu "dropping"

From IRIN, a story about the famine in the Horn of Africa. Humanitarian workers in the region say the number of people fleeing Somalia for the refugee camps is beginning to drop.

Humanitarian officials say the number of drought-displaced families arriving in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, has dropped in the past two weeks as more and more families cross the border into neighbouring Kenya and Ethiopia, while others go to the Al-Shabab-controlled town of Baidoa, in the south-central Bay region.

"Between 15 June and 15 July, we had about 500 families reaching Mogadishu every day but the number has since decreased to about 250 families daily," said Ahmed Abdi Muhumed, a programme manager for Muslim Aid in Somalia, a UK-based NGO.

Muhumed said Baidoa, 250km northwest of Mogadishu, was now home to between 6,000 and 7,000 drought-displaced families. Baidoa, capital of the Bay region, is the third-largest town in the country, after Mogadishu and Kismayo.

So far, Muhumed said, the NGO Islamic Relief and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) were the only two aid organizations active in Baidoa. He added that Muslim Aid would begin operations there this week.

"We have assessed and found that between five and 10 children are dying in Baidoa daily due to starvation and diseases including malnutrition and diarrhoea; we are going to start food distribution and feeding this week," Muhumed said.

According to the UN, an estimated 300,000 people are in humanitarian emergency in Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions in south-central Somalia, two of five regions the UN has categorized as experiencing famine.

Muhumed said at least 150,000 out of the 300,000 people were at risk of starvation.

Nearer Mogadishu, in an area known as 50km, thousands of families are also at risk of starvation, according to Muslim Aid.

Muhumed said: "In the first days of our operations in and around Mogadishu, we found that many people preferred going to main urban centres, so we divided our operation into two: first, in 50km we distributed food and shelter to 2,000 families, then we distributed food to 3,000 families in camps for the internally displaced in Mogadishu."

Afgoye

The situation is deteriorating in the Afgoye corridor, west of Mogadishu, where up to 400,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) have sought refuge.

"The drought displacement has caused a livelihood emergency in Afgoye corridor because the numbers of new arrivals are so high and this has made the situation difficult even for the displaced who have been here for long," Muhumed said.

Al-Shabab authorities in Baidoa recently told journalists that only US$3,000 was needed to feed the drought-affected in the town, adding that Somalis in the diaspora had sent some money to help the vulnerable families.

At the same time, members of the Transitional Federal Parliament of Somalia in Bay and Bakool regions have expressed concern about the humanitarian crisis in their areas.

"We know that about 6,000-7,000 families are now in Baidoa; they have nothing," Mohamed Abdi Ganay, an MP from Bay region, said. "Most of the people are from Ufurow, Qansah-Dheere, Dinsor and Bakool areas. The ICRC [International Committee of the Red Crescent] has distributed food to 780 families but many others are still suffering."

Speaking on behalf of MPs from the two regions, Ganay said they were calling on Al-Shabab to allow humanitarian agencies access to the drought-displaced in the Bay and Bakool regions.

"So far, this access has not been granted; we are discussing with the government to see if we can find solutions," he said.

Rains help the parched land, but add misery to refugees

There has been some rain in Somalia over the last couple of days but it has only added to the misery of those living in the refugee tent camps surrounding Mogadishu. The rain and wind have swept away a lot of the tents, leaving the people who were sleeping under them cold, wet and asking for more help.

From the Guardian, this Associated Press article gives us the latest update on the famine.

Suffering refugees said more aid was vital but agencies have limited reach in Somalia where Islamist militants, including the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab, are waging an insurgency against the country's weak UN-backed government.

"We are living in plight, we left our homes, lost our animals and farms so we ask everyone to help us to survive," Abdi Muse Abshir said.

Lul Hussein, a mother of five, said her family had a sleepless night after their makeshift home crumbled.

"We are starved and we don't have enough help," she said. "Who's helping us? No one! So we are already between death and bad life."

Al-Shabab, the most dangerous group among the militants al-Shabab, has barred major relief organisations from operating in the territories it controls.

The UN said tens of thousands of people have died in Somalia in areas held by the Islamist rebels because food aid could not reach them.

Non-traditional donors steeping up for Horn of Africa relief

Something unique is being seen in the donations coming in for Horn of Africa drought relief. Arab nations are stepping up to play a larger role in contributions. In the past they played a secondary role with smaller donations that the west. Their increase from Arab nations ise sorely needed as the EU and US are unable to help as much as they have before.

From the Guardian, the latest commentary from Jeffery Sachs takes a look at some of the economic factors behind the donations.

The "traditional donors", including the US and the EU, have fallen far short of promises they made at the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, in 2009 to assist smallholder farmers, including pastoralists. Both the US and the EU are in a deep political and financial crisis, meaning that neither is likely to step forward with the scale of emergency and long-term aid to the Horn of Africa that they should normally be expected to fulfill.

In this situation, it is heartening that the Gulf countries, including members of the GCC, have demonstrated a readiness to step up their assistance to the Horn of Africa, just across the Red Sea. These countries are experiencing an impressive rise in export earnings this year, giving them the opportunity to scale up their regional and global leadership as well. The Islamic Development Bank, the leading financing institution of the 57 countries of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC), has also shown impressive and inspiring dynamism as well as a commitment to the countries in crisis in the Horn of Africa.

New donors, in short, are stepping forward to help fill the urgent needs of the Horn of Africa. Time is extremely short and the needs are great. Generosity and speed are of the essence.

G-20 food ministers attend emergency meeting on the Horn of Africa

France called for an emergency meeting of food and agriculture ministers to discuss the drought in the Horn of Africa. Minsters of the G-20 nations met in Rome to talk about how to best combat the crisis and drum up some more pledges of support.

From the BBC, we find out more about what went on at the meting.

The meeting of ministers from the G20 nations at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation headquarters in Rome was requested by France, the current chair of the G20 group of powerful economies.

"Our meeting is a question of life or death for tens of thousands of people," Mr Le Maire said at the start of the meeting, AFP reports.

Bob Geldof and other celebrity activists are urging the international community to come up with more cash.

They accuse some countries - Italy, France, the Arab states and Germany - of contributing too little in proportion to their national wealth.
Ethiopia safety-net

Mr Le Maire told the BBC said the first aim of the meeting was to co-ordinate the aid and response to the crisis.

"The second goal is also to think about the future and the long-term perspective because what we see here in Africa is that people need to have their own food and to have their own agriculture," he said.

BBC Africa analyst Martin Plaut says many people at the heart of the current disaster - in Ethiopia - have emerged relatively unscathed.

This is because the government in Addis Ababa has such an extensive safety net in place, he says.

Why little effort goes into preventing the next crisis

We are seeing many comments today on prevention efforts for drought/famine with the news focused on the current crisis in the Horn of Africa. Weather patterns that occurred months ago predicted that this drought would happen. When the Horn of Africa began to dry up, none of the aid we are seeing pledged now moved into help. If climate change continues, another drought could occur in the region in a couple of years. We could see a repeat of everything we are seeing now shortly unless some money is put into prevention as well as emergency food.

Below is a round up on some of the prevention commentary. First, from the Guardian, columnist John Vidal talks about the repeting cycle the Horn of Africa seems to be trapped in.

Nor was the crisis unexpected. The rains failed early this year in Kenya and Ethiopia, and there has been next to none for two years now in Somalia. Aid agencies and governments have known for almost a year that food would run out by now. But it is only now, when the children begin to die and the cattle have been sold or died that the global humanitarian machine has moved in, with its TV shows, co-ordinated appeals and celebrities. Why did it not go earlier? Because it takes months to prepare properly for a disaster.

Just as in 2008, the war in Somalia is primarily responsible for the worst that is happening. As Simon Levine of the Overseas Development Institute says: "Wars don't kill many people directly but can kill millions through the way they render them totally vulnerable to the kinds of problems they should be able to cope with." In this case, he says, people have lost all their assets and can't access grazing grounds they need. But remember too, that Somalia has been made a war zone by the US-led "war on terror". It's our fault as much as anyone's.

But another, more insidious war has also been taking place across the region. This one is being waged by governments and businesses against the pastoralists. Over the years, they have been steadily marginalised and discriminated against by Ugandan, Kenyan and Ethiopian governments, and now they are further jeopardised by large-scale farming, the expansion of national parks, and game reserves and conservation.

For the politicians in Kampala, Nairobi or Addis, the lifestyle of these people seems archaic and outmoded. They are said to be outside mainstream national development, and to be pursuing a way of life that is in crisis and decline. So the politicians think little of taking away their dry season grazing grounds or blocking their traditional routes to pasture land. However, as seen in major international studies, the pastoralists produce more and better quality meat and generate more cash per hectare than "modern" Australian and US ranches.

Instead of starving the region's people of funds and then picking up the pieces in the bad years – as governments must do now – Britain, the EU, the US and Japan must help people adapt to the hotter, drier conditions they face. With better pumps and boreholes, better vaccination of cattle, help with education, food storage and transport, people can live well again.

The facts are that people donate money when they see suffering on TV. They don't donate money when someone tells them that there hasn't been enough rain lately. NGOs and governments fall into the same trap, they move into action in times of crisis, not during times of preparation. Reuters Alert Net reporters George Obulutsa and Katy Migiro, touch on why charities and governments do little towards development that could prevent the next disaster.

"We have to invest much more in countries that are vulnerable to drought," said the European Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, Kristalina Georgieva.

"Droughts are going to come again and again."

In the northern district of Moyale, child malnutrition rates are half those of neighbouring districts thanks to investment in drought preparedness, Georgieva said.

At a cost of $20, it is ten times cheaper to identify and treat children who are at risk of malnutrition before they reach a critical state than to pay for life-saving therapeutic care.

"Prevention is not sexy. This is fundamentally what the problem is," she said.

"If out of this drought, we come with a commitment to look into the long term structural factors --if we are brave enough to talk about population growth, if we are brave enough to talk about adaptation to climate change -- then the people who are dying are not dying for nothing."

Finally, the Science and Development Network has an editorial that includes a host of links to stories they did months ago that pointed to the future disaster. We won't include a snippet here but suggest you read it at the following link.

UN asks for another billion dollars for drought relief

The United Nations is asking for another billion dollars from its member countries to aid the drought in the Horn of Africa. The United States has so far given 28 million dollars for the humanitarian emergency.

From the Guardian, this Associated Press article details the plea for money from the UN.

More than 11 million people are estimated to need help in Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and South Sudan and particularly Somalia, which the UN World Food Programme executive director, Josette Sheeran, called the "epicentre of the famine".

Some mothers have had to make the "horrifying choice of saving the strongest" of their children while leaving the weakest behind to die as starving families make the long, desperate trek from Somalia to refugee camps across borders in search of food aid, said Sheeran.

Lady Amos, the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said just under $1bn had been received from donors but "we need another billion".

Video: 'Worst drought in decades' hits Kenya

From Reuters Alert Net, this video gives us a summary of the events surrounding the drought in Kenya and Somalia.

"We either burn charcoal or die of starvation"

From IRIN, a story about one family who is struggling through the drought and livestock theft.

Veronica Erupe has lived in the village of Manyatta Chokaa, along the Isiolo-Samburu district border in northern Kenya, since 2008 when she fled drought and frequent livestock rustling at her Baragoi home, 600km away.

Erupe, a single mother of four, told IRIN how losing the family's livestock had forced her to flee her home and pushed her into a life of poverty selling charcoal.

"I was not born here; my family came to this village from Baragoi to escape the terror of bandits. It’s a miracle that we survived [so] many raids. The final raid, during which our 50 remaining goats were stolen, left us poor.

"It is sad that drought and livestock rustling uprooted us from our home. Baragoi was a place I loved; I had many friends [there].

"I still remember the journey; it took us eight days to reach here [Manyatta Chokaa].

"Life since 2008 has been full of hardships for me and my children; my husband quit the marriage.

"I have been relying on selling charcoal since my arrival here. It provided the first meal for my family and helped construct this house. I could buy food, paraffin and clothes.

"But now, life is expensive and it's difficult for charcoal traders to afford food and items like soap.

"[Recently], the population at our village and other settlements like it - Eremit, Attan, Manyatta Zebra and Ngaremara - has doubled with hundreds of desperate families, who have lost their animals to prolonged drought and cattle rustling.

"This village is now full of former wealthy livestock owners, who are now selling charcoal in Isiolo, so the price of a sack of charcoal has dropped to KSh600 (US$6.67) from KSh1,000 ($11.11) in January.

"But the cost of maize flour, cooking oil, vegetables, paraffin and transport to Isiolo, where we go for treatment, has increased.

"I have tried to adjust, but it's still tough. My children no longer take a bath; I have not bought them clothes this year. I give them bone soup once a month as they were used to eating meat.

"We have to walk over 30km to get good trees to make charcoal but we risk meeting dangerous animals like elephants along the way. Some women and young girls have been attacked, injured and killed.

"It’s meaningless to work for KSh600 a week [but] we have no choice. We either burn charcoal or die of starvation.

"Manual work is no longer available as those who used to employ us to do house chores are also affected. Some girls are selling their bodies, and it’s risky with HIV/AIDS.

"We need assistance to settle, start small businesses. Our children need scholarships to pursue an education, and they need health facilities.

"We [charcoal sellers] are considered a nuisance, enemies to the environment and our charcoal is often confiscated. But we deserve to be assisted rather than condemned."

Famine declared for two regions of Somalia

The United Nations is now declaring the drought in the Horn of Africa has reached a famine stage for two states within Somalia. The hunger and malnutrition in Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions of Somalia is so bad that the crisis has been upgraded to a famine. The UN's official definition of famine is two deaths per 10,000 people with malnutrition reaching more than 30%.

From the Guardian, writer Mark Tran records the statement from the UN humanitarian coordinator Mark Bowden.

He warned: "If we don't act now, famine will spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months, due to poor harvests and infectious disease outbreaks.

"We still do not have all the resources for food, clean water, shelter and health services to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Somalis in desperate need."

He added that the lack of resources is alarming. "Every day of delay in assistance is literally a matter of life or death for children and their families in the famine-affected areas."

UN humanitarian agencies have welcomed the recent statement by al-Shabaab, Islamist insurgents affiliated to al-Qaida, requesting aid in southern Somalia, but said the inability of food agencies to work in the region since early 2010 has prevented the UN from reaching the very hungry – especially children – and has contributed to the current crisis. The Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions are understood to be controlled by al-Shabaab. The UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, said it was seeking further security guarantees from the rebel group that it can deliver greater amounts of assistance in the area to prevent more hungry people from becoming refugees.

The drought in east Africa has left an estimated 11 million people at risk, but Somalia has been the worst hit country as it is already wracked by decades of conflict. The most affected areas of Somalia are in the south, particularly the region of Lower Shabelle, Middle and Lower Juba, Bay, Bakool, Benadir, Gedo and Hiraan, where the UN says an estimated 310,000 now suffer from acute malnutrition.

The Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU) said the crisis represented the most serious food insecurity situation in the world today, in terms of scale and severity.

"Current humanitarian response is inadequate to meet emergency needs," it said. "Assuming current levels of response, evidence suggests that famine across all regions of the south will occur in the coming one to two months. A massive multisectoral response is critical to prevent additional deaths and total livelihood/social collapse and, most immediately, interventions to improve food access and to address health/nutrition issues are needed."

MSF gives an eyewitness account of East African drought

As the drought continues in the Horn of Africa medical professionals are seeing more and more patients each day. Sometimes the doctors just provide the patient food to ward of malnutrition Other patients might to weak to eat and will instead require to be fed through tubes.

The poeple suffering through the drought in Somalia also have the armed conflict in the region to contend with. The war prevents most aid and food from being delivered to the people.

From Médecins Sans Frontières, Dr. Hussein Sheikh Qassim gives an eyewitness account from an MSF field hospital.

“In Marere, the situation is extremely dire. This is the only hospital in this part of Somalia. There are not any other clinics, not even mobile clinics, anywhere near here. People are coming here from all over the country. Word spreads.

Recently, the numbers have gone through the roof. Even on our quiet days, we are seeing twice as many people as we did on busy days before the drought. The hospital is absolutely full of patients. Some are sick, others just need something to eat. The malnutrition ward is beyond full of young children, most of them too weak even to eat, so we have to feed them through tubes.

Some of these children had to walk for over 600 kilometers [360 miles] to get here because their parents couldn’t afford transport and were too weak to carry them on their backs. There is an ongoing civil war in many parts of the country, with some towns and villages changing hands on a daily basis. These are dangerous areas and it is not safe to travel. But still the people come.

Those who are lucky and are still on their feet are admitted as outpatients, 300 yesterday, 400 last Friday. But lots of children have to go straight to the inpatient feeding center. It’s only lunchtime, and we’ve already admitted 151 children today.

Uneven growth in India leaves one state in a food crisis

India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, yet that growth has been very uneven. One state within India is still going through a food crisis because of repeated droughts.

From the Guardian, writer Nilanjana Bhowmick talks about the state of hunger in Madhya Pradesh.

Bundelkhand lies mainly in Madhya Pradesh, the second largest state in India and the one that contains the greatest concentration of hungry people in the country. The Indian State Hunger Index released in 2008 placed Madhya Pradesh in the "extremely alarming" hunger category. The state is a glaring example of everything that is wrong with India's poverty elimination efforts.

Of the 118 countries on the global hunger index, India ranks 98th, with 214 million people going hungry. Millennium development goal 1, which looks to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and provide food security by 2015, is miles off.

In 1993-94, 44.6% of people were living at below the poverty line in Madhya Pradesh. If MDG targets are to be met, that figure must go down to 22.3% by 2015. Yet, according to new poverty estimates produced by a government fact-finding commission, poverty in the state has increased by 4% to 48.6%. A survey by a local NGO revealed 83% of children are undernourished and most families go to bed on an empty stomach.
...

A key factor in India's plight has been the government's espousal of development at the cost of agriculture - the mainstay of people in the rural areas. Nationally, agriculture provides 67% of employment. In the last financial year, the Indian government provided around 500,000 crores (US$112bn) of subsidies and exemptions to the industrial and corporate sector, which contributes just 22% to the employment sector, while government expenditure on agriculture declined by 4.3%.

India's hunger problem has also been compounded by the high price of food over the last couple of years. A report on consumption patterns in rural India by the National Sample Survey Organisation shows a decline of 1.97%. In 2005-06, an average of 11.9kg of food grain was consumed per month, per family member, at a cost of 106 rupees ($2.38). In 2006-07, that figure came down to 11.69kg, with the cost of food increasing to 115 rupees ($2.58).
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One such scheme is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA), which came into being in 2005. The scheme ensures rural people livelihood security by guaranteeing them 100 days of work every year. Under the terms of NREGA, every rural Indian has the right to work within 15 days of requesting it and without having to travel more than three miles outside their village.

Dreze, one of the chief architects of the programme, says that it provides employment to 50 million poor people every year, but he admits that the implementation has been faulty.

"NREGA is a pro-worker law implemented by an anti-worker system," he says. "One manifestation of this is the systematic resistance of the administration to any sort of accountability. All the accountability provisions - unemployment allowance, compensation for delayed payments, penalty clauses - have been sidelined. This defeats the purpose of the act."

Half a million children "at risk" in Eastern Africa drought

From IRIN, an update on the drought in Eastern Africa.

At least 500,000 malnourished children in the Horn of Africa's drought-affected areas risk death if immediate help does not reach them, Anthony Lake, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) executive director, has said.

These are the children suffering from severe acute malnutrition, whose clinical signs include swelling in the feet, legs or face caused by an extreme shortage of protein.

"This crisis is likely to deepen over the coming six months or so," Lake told a news conference in Nairobi on 17 July at the end of a visit to the northwestern Turkana region and Dadaab - home to thousands of Somali refugees - in the northeast.

Lake said: "I talked to a mother who was feeding her child pounded palm nuts, with no nutritional value, moistened in her mouth as the local wells have become saline."

Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) rates of 37 percent have been recorded in Turkana. Malnutrition is described as severe acute or global acute. A GAM value of more than 10 percent generally signifies an emergency.

Across the Horn of Africa, at least 10.7 million people in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia need urgent humanitarian aid due to the drought, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

In Somalia, thousands are fleeing the country or heading to the capital, Mogadishu. An estimated 3,200 Somali refugees are crossing into Kenya and Ethiopia daily.

Desperation

Justin Forsyth, chief executive of Save the Children UK, said: "Over the past few days, I've seen first-hand the enormous suffering the drought is causing in the Daadab refugee camp and across northern Kenya. Families I've met are absolutely desperate for food and water, and we know that the situation in Somalia is even worse."

Humanitarian actors have welcomed a recent statement by the Islamist opposition group in Somalia, Al-Shabab, allowing humanitarian access to south-central regions. Lake said this "will help us to ramp up support".

On 13 July, UNICEF airlifted emergency nutrition and water supplies to Baidoa, southern Somalia, the first time in more than two years, Lake said.

In Mogadishu, doctors with the African Union peacekeeping Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) are helping to tackle a measles outbreak at a camp for the drought-displaced. Some 9,300 people, who fled their homes in the central and southern regions, arrived in Mogadishu in June, according to the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR.

Lt-Col Kaamurari Katwekyeire, head of AMISOM's Civil-Military Cooperation, said: "The need is great and we can only make small emergency interventions. We hope that humanitarian organizations will take advantage of the improved security situation to come to the aid of the Somali people."

In Kenya, communities neighbouring the refugee camps are complaining about the attention given to the Somali refugees when they are not faring any better.

Lake said: "They [the drought-affected] are suffering what is a perfect storm due to the drought, rising food prices, shortages of the food pipeline... these people live on the edge in any case. This is not just a question about lives being threatened but a way of life being threatened."

The drought has hit pastoral communities in the arid and semi-arid parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia the hardest [ http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=93142 ].

On 17 July, the UK’s international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, pledged £52.25 million (US$84 million) in emergency aid for at least one million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.

The aid is in addition to previous support for 1.36 million people in Ethiopia, announced on 3 July. The Ethiopian government launched an appeal on 11 July saying at least 4.56 million drought-affected people needed help.

The new UK funds are for programmes to prevent and treat malnutrition and improve care for refugees in the Daadab and Dolo Ado camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, respectively.

Mitchell called for more international engagement in the Horn of Africa crisis, saying there was a need to prevent a disaster turning into a catastrophe.

"It is a horrible thing in our world today that a baby should die due to a lack of food," he said.

Video: Drought crisis in Somalia: inside report

From Concern Worldwide, a video that gives us an eyewitness account of a refugee camp in drought stricken Somalia.