famine – One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?

The aftermath of the food crisis in the Horn of Africa is ongoing and the effects of the famine in Niger in 2010 are still being felt and yet a new crisis is looming. More than 18 million people in 8 countries could be affected and over 1 million children under 5 risk severe acute malnutrition if food shortages and drought in the Sahel escalate. Over the last 12 months 43 million have been added to the number of people going hungry in the world due to severe food shortages.

Calls for early action to prevent a famine in the Sahel have been made but will the international community respond rapidly enough? A failure to respond to early warnings and calls for help has been widely cited as contributing to the scale of the crisis in the Horn of Africa, and detailed in Oxfam’s report A Dangerous Delay.

The escalating drought has already depleted food stocks as of March 2012 and harvest is not until September. Grain production in many areas of the Sahel is 36% lower than for 2011. Increasing food prices due to chronic shortages and speculation as well as regional conflicts, particularly in Mali, have compounded the situation as have untreated locust outbreaks able to move across the area. As with most famines, it may have been sparked by the drought but a lot of other factors, infrastructural, political and social, have combined to cause this escalating crisis.

So far the international community has committed to half ($700 million) the total amount in aid called for in December 2011. But the crisis is expected to get a lot worse before it gets better if the international community does not take urgent and significant action.

While future plans to break the cycle of famine (this will be the third drought in the Sahel in ten years) must focus more on prevention, the situation in the Sahel, quoted as having never been this bad, demands international attention now.

Filed Under: 4 - The Political Economy of Food Security Tagged With: aid, donors, drought, famine, food crisis, food security, food stocks, grain production, horn of Africa, locusts, Niger, Oxfam, prevention, Sahel

Africa Human Development Report 2012: Towards a Secure Future

September 28, 2012 by canwefeedtheworld Leave a Comment

The UNDP recently released (in August 2012) a new report entitled Africa Human Development Report. It emphasizes the need for a coordinated, multi-sectoral approach to hunger and starvation in Africa. Rarely is the frustration and disbelief that the ‘spectre of famine…continues to haunt parts of Sub-Saharan Africa’, put so eloquently. Indeed, one in four Africans is undernourished and yet Sub-Saharan Africa has ‘ample agricultural land, plenty of water, a generally favourable climate for growing food’ and, in the past 10 years, ‘world-beating economic growth rates’ in some countries.

The solutions outlined in the report are not new: greater production, better access and increased human capability but this report goes further in saying these are necessary but not sufficient conditions for achieving food security. Good nutrition, robust policies, which support smallholder farmers, strong institutions and a focus on resilience are also critical. While many reports focus on some of these aspects, complex as they are on their own, this report gives an overview of the myriad of solutions that not only exist but that must come together to achieve food security.

Empowerment and human rights are also integral to the report: …’the basic right to food….is being violated in Sub-Saharan Africa to an intolerable degree’. Giving all people a voice and ensuring governments and are accountable to all people is an argument rarely used alongside the practical means of tackling hunger.

This report that lays out the issues in a powerful way, concluding that, ‘The challenge of food security in Sub-Saharan Africa is formidable, the timeframe for action tight and the investment required substantial. But the potential gains for human development are immense.’ Let’s hope the language is powerful enough to inspire action.