East Africa Food Crisis.

Yesterday (8/7/11) Britain's Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) launched an emergency appeal to raise funds to help up to 10 million people who face starvation in the east African countries of Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and the newly formed South Sudan. Although the DEC represents 14 British charities in this case the majority of the money raised will go to the Save the Children charity that has been leading operations in the region for a number of years.

As for the crisis in east Africa itself there are actually two major problems at work;

The Climate: All the nations affected are part of the Sahel belt that stretches across Africa. For the past several decades the entire Sahel region has seen more and more arable farmland lost as the desert expands reducing the amount of food that can be grown there. This is a highly contentious issue that has been at the heart of international debates about global warming and climate change since those arguments began. Regardless of the cause though the past two rainy seasons in east Africa have failed to happen. This lack of rainfall has caused widespread crop failures and meant that the United Nations (UN) Integrated Food Security and Humanitarian Phase Classification Framework (IPC) famine early warning system has been issuing almost monthly alerts for the region since August 2010.

Somalia: Since the collapse of it's government in 1991 Somalia has become a complete failed state where everybody is armed and there are often several civil wars going on at the same time. In recent years Somalia has also become the third front in America's war on terror/Al Qaeda. All this fighting has made normal life pretty much impossible so there is little food production and even less food importation and the nations main source of income has become maritime piracy. Obviously a society where people are lucky to live long enough to starve to death has created a huge and long running refugee problem as Somali's flee to neighbouring countries.

What makes this month different from the past 12 months in east Africa is that the Dadaab refugee camp in south-eastern Kenya which is operated by Britain's Department For International Development (DFID) and Save the Children has begun reporting an increase in the number of refugees arriving from Somalia. This has caused the severity of the situation to rise on the IPC index to one level below all out famine and forced the UN to go into emergency mode. So Britain seems to have escalated the situation in east Africa in order to provoke a UN wide discussion. The true purpose of that discussion is to be used as a metaphor for a discussion about Britain's role in the UN post-Libya and well my situation. The discussion can also be used to discuss the very complicated situation in Somalia, the very complicated situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the very complicated issue of Sudan's separation and the extraordinarily complicated issue of the Israel/Palestine situation. The discussion also touches on issues of climate change and the eternal argument over the best way to deliver international aid specifically the approach taken by British organisations such as DFID and Save the Children.


Although this crisis is more politically driven then a full scale humanitarian disaster and I know that money is tight everywhere but the situation in east Africa is bad and has been bad for a long time now. So if you have any spare money you might want to donate it too;

Unicef; http://www.supportunicef.org/site/pp.asp?c=9fLEJSOALpE&b=7542627

The UN's World Food Program; https://www.wfp.org/donate/fillthecup?icn=homepage-donate-cup&ici=big-button-link

Because even if they're not needed to help in this crisis they'll certainly be needed to help in the next one.