National Post: Severe Hunger threatens 20M in East Africa

09/09/2009

Peter Goodspeed, The National Post 
Published: Wednesday, September 09, 2009

With war-ravaged Somalia engulfed in a fresh round of fighting, leading Canadian aid agencies predict East Africa is plunging into its worst humanitarian crisis in decades.

The Humanitarian Coalition, which includes CARE Canada, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Quebec and Save the Children Canada, warns East Africa faces "a perfect storm of crop failures, a multi-year lack of rain, conflicts and political turmoil," which now threatens 20 million people with severe hunger.

In Somalia, where recent fighting between Islamist rebels and Somali government forces backed by African Union peacekeepers has claimed the lives of 2,000 civilians, half the population already needs food assistance and one in five children is severely malnourished.

But fierce new fighting in Mogadishu now threatens a further deterioration in the humanitarian situation and is sending a fresh wave of refugees fleeing.

On Monday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced that more than 250,000 people have been displaced by fighting in Somalia since May, pushing the number of displaced people in the country to 1.55 million.

According to the aid agencies, most of the displaced are women and children who are living without access to water, sanitation or medical care in crowded and badly managed camps in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.

The Dadaab camp in northeastern Kenya, which was intended to hold 90,000 people, is now one of the world's largest single concentrations of refugees, with almost 300,000 people.

Oxfam officials recently described the camp as "barely fit for humans," saying half the people in the camp have no access to water and women and children rarely have access to adequate latrines.

Yet Oxfam predicts another 100,000 refugees may flee increased fighting in Somalia this year and seek safety in Kenya.

For the fourth year in a row, East Africa is in the grip of a devastating drought, which is killing crops, livestock and children, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

"The rainy seasons successively have been poor, then you have the other problems of post-election violence in Kenya, the war in Somalia and the inability to plant crops. All of this increases food insecurity," said Stephen Gwynne-Vaughan, the head of CARE's Kenya office.

"The resiliency of these people has just been stretched beyond its limits," he said. "They can't take any more shocks."

But in the face of one of the world's worst ongoing humanitarian tragedies, the international community has been slow to respond. A UN-led emergency appeal for $576-million in relief aid for Eastern Africa remains only 28% funded.

Fighting in Somalia has also made it difficult to distribute aid to hundreds of thousands of displaced people in south-central Somalia.

One of the worst-affected areas is a 15-kilometre strip of land near the town of Afgooye, 30 km southwest of the capital, Mogadishu. Originally a town of fewer than 20,000, it now has a population of 524,000 displaced people who fled fighting in Mogadishu and camped along the road from the city.

The Islamist insurgent group al Shabaab and its ally Hizbul Islam have stepped up attempts to topple the government of Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who came to power this year as part of a UN-backed peace process.

Any increase in fighting is bound to worsen Somalia's refugee problems and increase pressure on refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Aid agencies estimate that 18,000 civilians may have died in Somalia's civil war since 2006.

"Somalis flee one of the world's most brutal conflicts and a desperate drought, only to end up in unimaginable conditions in camps that are barely fit for humans," Robert Van den Berg, Oxfam International's spokesman for the Horn of Africa, said last week.

UNICEF recently estimated that 70,000 of the 250,000 Somali children under the age of five who are living in crude refugee camps in south-central Somalia are at risk of death.

In the meantime, everyone in the region is threatened by drought.

One in 10 Kenyans is in need of food assistance, according to the World Food Program. In Ethiopia, 10 million people are threatened by hunger and malnutrition, and 4.6 million require urgent food assistance.