East Africa’s hunger emergency
As a result of severe drought in Ethiopia and war in South Sudan, millions are facing starvation.
South Africa— Humanitarian groups are growing increasingly concerned about two hunger emergencies unfolding in East Africa— one caused by drought, theother by war.
Millions of people in Ethiopia and South Sudan are short on food, international agencies say, and in South Sudan, conflict has made it difficult for outside groups to help.
Ethiopia’ s emergency unfolded swift ly, as the worst drought in six decades saw successive crop failures. Between August and October, the number of people in need of help doubled, and numbers have continued to rise sharply since, with the drought exacerbated by El Niño.
Now, 10.2 million Ethiopians are in critical need of food aid. International agencies are trying desperately to raise funds to prevent the food emergency from deteriorating into a full- fledged famine, but so far they say they have raised only a small portion of the cash they need to offer help.
An estimated $ 1.4 billion in humanitarian aid and donations is needed to address the crisis, according to a joint document issued by humanitarian agencies and the Ethiopian government.
In South Sudan, the crisis is taking place in slow motion, as the frozen wheels of a bitter two- year conflict leave people marooned, out of reach of humanitarian agencies. About 40,000 of them a reina“Phase 5” hunger emergency, which, translated from humanitarian bureaucratese, normally means famine. For technical reasons. however, it hasn’t formally been declared a famine, in part because humanitarian workers haven’t been able to get to some of the worst- hit areas to count how many people are dying.
“There are people who are, right now, facing catastrophic levels of hunger. They are starving,” said Challiss McDonough, spokeswoman for the World Food Program in a phone interview. “We have been very limited in our ability to get in and measure how bad things are.”
Many people in South Sudan couldn’t plant crops because of fighting. About 3 million people are facing a hunger crisis and need assistance, according to humanitarian agencies. Of those, 400,000 are in a severe emergency situation and 40,000 are in a catastrophe.
“There are12 million people in South Sudan. Outof12 million people, 5 million people are food secure. It means that there are 7 million who have problems,” according to Serge Tissot of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, which assessed the need last month.
“The situation is worse nowin 2016 than itwas at the beginning of 2015,” Tissot said in a phone interview.
Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, of the 10.2 million people in need, 2.1million are considered acutely malnourished, according to McDonough.
She said the World Food Program has less than 5% of the funding it needs to help people in Ethiopia.
“Humanitarian needs globally are so enormous right now that donors are struggling to do anything near what’s needed. You’ve got layered global humanitarian crises,” she added, referring the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and the massive numbers of refugees. “It’s hard for the donors to keep up.”
Cattle, which families rely on for meat, and oxen used to plow the fields to plant crops have been dying in huge numbers in Ethiopia, though there is no official estimate on how many have perished.
“The issue is critical,” said Amadou Allahoury, the Ethiopia representative for the Food and Agriculture Organization. “The livestocks ector is already highly affected.”
He said the U. N. hopes to save “the core breeding animals,” but so far lacks sufficient funding.
About 80% of the population relies on agriculture to survive, according to Allahoury. Ethiopia, Africa’s secondmost populous nation with nearly 100 million people, has made progress in reducing the vulnerability of its population in recent years, cutting its mortality rate for children under age 5 by two- thirds between 1990 and 2012.
But the drought threatens to set back progress in rural areas, where communities face a prolonged crisis.
A famine in Ethiopia in 1983- 85 left an estimated 400,000 people dead.
John Graham of Save the Children said last month in a statement that people in the worst affected areas were forced to make terrible choices: slaughtering the oxen that would be used for planting next season — should the rains come— and eating the seeds saved for planting.
“The severity of the current drought is devastating communities and undermining the tremendous progress that the country has made in development over the last decade; we cannot stand by and watch that progress be lost,” Graham said.
Ethiopia was in drought even before El Niño hit. Whereas El Niño typically brings more rain to California and the southern United States, it causes or exacerbates drought in other parts of the world, including eastern and southern Africa.
Despite an August peace deal designed to bring an end to South Sudan’s civil war, that country’s future remains just as uncertain. It began as a conflict between two rival sides of the government and army — both of which split in two along ethnic lines as a struggle for power exploded at the end of 2013. Fighting continues in some areas and progress on the key elements of the peace deal has been glacial.
Now, the situation has become increasingly complex as two dozen armed groups have sprung up, some threatening the main trade road that links the north and south, cutting off food supplies.