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Areas of food shortages and famine in East Africa
Just bringing this back.
10.7 MILLION people are still in dire need of humanitarian assistance.
(via climateadaptation)
K’naan writing beautifully about his recent trip back to his homeland, Somalia
A gorgeous piece of writing, full of ache.
(Source: dancinggen)
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) International President, Unni Karunakara, calls on aid agencies to stop presenting a misleading picture of the famine in Somalia and admit that helping the worst-affected people is almost impossible.
Charity president says aid groups are misleading the public on Somalia
(via doctorswithoutborders)
#preach
(via doctorswithoutborders)
A boy wears a new suit and tie as Somali refugees gather to pray during celebrations of Eid al-Fitr to mark the end of Ramadan in the Ifo marketplace at Kenya’s Dadaab Refugee Camp, situated northeast of the capital Nairobi near the Somali border, August 30, 2011.
Photo by REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
via kilele
This is positively adorable. Consider this your D’awwwwww of the day.
I feel you. That’s always hard - there’s the obvious thing, donating to organizations doing good work, but not everyone can afford to do that, or can afford to give to the measure they’d like to. Generally, going to volunteer somewhere can do more harm than good and isn’t an effective way of helping people and areas in need. And ‘raising awareness’ is so often a hollow, shallow tool that isn’t utilized to really spur other people to action and compassion the way it’s supposed to - I definitely feel and share your pain here.
What I’d suggest doing is, if you have some free time, volunteer with an organization - don’t go overseas to build a school or a well, but take some time to understand how aid and development work happens and some of the difficulties of doing good work. You’ll learn a lot about the organization and the people they work with, and they’ll definitely appreciate it: you’ll also get to talk to some amazing people and learn from them.
Then, use that information to really raise awareness and provoke change: challenge the way people think about development, conflict, and the world. Adjust the choices you make (buying fair trade, how you use your resources) and persuade other people to examine and adjust theirs as well. Try to live your life as a global citizen and catalize not just awareness, but action and justice.
It’s hard, and it’s often really difficult to see how exactly that “helps,” because it’s not immediately tangible. But ultimately, I think that has a really great capacity to change the world, and it’s something that people with even just a little bit of time can do.
Some great organizations I’d recommend donating to, volunteering for, and learning from:
-Us! (Oh, like there wasn’t going to be a plug in here somewhere.)
-Engineers Without Borders Canada (amazing wealth of volunteer opportunities all across Canada and no, you don’t have to be an engineer)
-Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders
Best of luck!
(Source: peanutbutterloverrrr)
For readers interested in contributing to help victims of the famine in Somalia, here is a list of links to some organizations that are providing relief. (The New York Times does not certify the charities’ fund allocations or administrative costs. More information about giving, for this and other causes, is available online from the GuideStar database on nonprofit agencies.)
International Rescue Committee
Save the Children, UNICEF, World Food Programme, and Catholic Relief Services all accept PayPal as form of payment if you’re not comfortable using a credit card.
Many of these organizations do great work; however, please support organizations that
A) source their food aid locally (so, so important)
B) are allowed to operate in Somalia (Al Shabaab is forbidding certain NGOs to enter the country)
The Canadian government will match your donations to certain NGOs; however, of the Humanitarian Coalition listed, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) is the only one currently working in Somalia, where the worst of the famine is.
And please, please read this: famine is not a natural disaster. And this one is horrific.
(via professorbutterscotch)
Perfectly illustrates Amartya Sen’s argument (see this 1998 Time article) that famine is a distribution problem, not a supply problem. And that there are no famines in democracies, whatever else their limitations (see this 2003 New York Times article).
Also interesting that Somaliland—the unrecognized secessionist region that has been a de facto independent state for two decades (see this 2010 Christian Science Monitor article)—seems to even do a better job of food security than Ethiopia, the regional power.
From ilyagerner:
Somali famine spreads to three more areas, says UN
Definition of Famine
- More than 30% of children must be suffering from acute malnutrition
- Two adults or four children must be dying of hunger each day for every group of 10,000 people
- The population must have access to far below 2,100 kilocalories of food per day (source)
I like this from Ed Carr (Via Daily Dish):
Famine stops at the Somali border. I assure you this is not a political manipulation of the data – it is the data we have. Basically, the people without a functional state and collapsing markets are being hit much harder than their counterparts in Ethiopia and Kenya, even though everyone is affected by the same bad rains, and the livelihoods of those in Somalia are not all that different than those across the borders in Ethiopia and Kenya.
A food “emergency” and food “crisis” sound like terrible things to experience but it says something about the importance of functional governance that “famine” stops at the border’s edge.
Drought might be the proximate cause of the crisis. Politics is at the root. Afterall, there are plenty of dry places in the world where drought conditions are not synonymous with starvation, with investment in irrigation, government relief efforts, and access to global markets making the difference.
Ed Carr’s analysis is fantastic. The environmental aspect was the last straw in this catastrophe, not the root cause.
(Source: newsflick)
After reading a lot of news and blog posts on the situation in the Horn of Africa, I feel the need to make something clear: the drought in the Horn of Africa is not the cause of the famine we are seeing take shape in southern Somalia. We are being pounded by a narrative of this famine that more or less points to the failure of seasonal rains as its cause … which I see as a horrible abdication of responsibility for the human causes of this tragedy. […] The long and short of it is that food insecurity is rarely about absolute supplies of food – mostly it is about access and entitlements to existing food supplies. The HoA situation does actually invoke outright scarcity, but that scarcity can be traced not just to weather – it is also about access to local and regional markets (weak at best) and politics/the state (Somalia lacks a sovereign state, and the patchy, ad hoc governance provided by al Shabaab does little to ensure either access or entitlement to food and livelihoods for the population). For those who doubt this, look at the FEWS NET maps I put in previous posts (here and here). Famine stops at the Somali border. I assure you this is not a political manipulation of the data – it is the data we have. Basically, the people without a functional state and collapsing markets are being hit much harder than their counterparts in Ethiopia and Kenya, even though everyone is affected by the same bad rains, and the livelihoods of those in Somalia are not all that different than those across the borders in Ethiopia and Kenya. Rainfall is not the controlling variable for this differential outcome, because rainfall is not really variable across these borders where Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia meet. This is not to say that rainfall doesn’t matter – it certainly does. But it is not the most important thing. […] On the other hand, it is clear that politics and markets have failed the people of Somalia – and the rainfall just pushed a very bad situation over the precipice into crisis. Thus, this is a human crisis first and foremost, whatever you think of anthropogenic climate change. Politics and markets are human inventions, and the decisions that drive them are also human. We can’t blame this famine on the weather – we need to be looking at everything from local and national politics that shape access and entitlements to food to global food markets that have driven the price of needed staples up across the world, thus curtailing access for the poorest. The bad news: Humans caused this. The good news: If we caused it, we can prevent the next one.
Agreed, a thousand times over (emphasis mine)
Horn of Africa sees ‘worst drought in 60 years’
The numbers now affected are huge, OHCA says: 3.2m in Ethiopia, 3.2m in Kenya, 2.6m in Somalia and more than 100,000 in Djibouti.
Every month during 2011, about 15,000 Somalis have fled their country, arriving in Kenya and Ethiopia, according to OCHA.
While conflict has been a fact of life for them for years, it is the drought that has brought them to breaking point.
Many have walked for days, are exhausted, in poor health, desperate for food and water.
Nearly one third of all children in the Juba region of Somalia are acutely malnourished, while in parts of Ethiopia the figure is even higher, the UN research says.
The price of grain in affected areas in Kenya is 30-80% above average.
The spokeswoman for OCHA, Elizabeth Byrs, said appeals for Somalia and Kenya, each about $525m (£328m), are barely 50% funded, while a $30m appeal for Djibouti has raised just 30% of the needed funds.
(source)
Article is worth reading: BBC. It’s one reason why the Pentagon is worried about climate change. Note the refugee centers on the map.
(Source: newsflick)
