Ten million people are on the brink of starvation in the Horn of Africa, as the region faces “a human tragedy of unimaginable proportions”, aid agencies warned this week.
Some parts of the region are experiencing the driest conditions in 60 years. Drought, displacement, and rising global food prices are leaving large areas of Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Djibouti with severe food shortages. About 1400 Somalis are estimated to be flooding into Kenya every day, many ending up at the Dadaab refugee camp, the largest such camp in the world, which contains more than 380,000 people.
Christian Aid’s humanitarian director, Nick Guttmann, said that the crisis had been building for some time and was “fast escalating across the region. People are desperate, and if we don’t act now, we could be looking at one of the worst humanitarian situations the world has seen for a long time.”
On Tuesday, the UNHCR expressed concern at the “unpreced-ented levels of malnutrition” among Somali refugees. It said that more than 50 per cent of Somali children arriving in Ethiopia, and between 30 to 40 per cent of those coming to Kenya, were seriously malnourished.
The refugee agency estimates that about 135,000 Somalis have been forced to flee their homeland this year because of drought and the civil war. A total of 54,000 people in June alone sought sanctuary in neighbouring countries. The UNHCR now estimates that a quarter of the population of 7.5 million of Somalia is now displaced — either intern-ally, or outside the country as refugees.
The UNHCR chief spokeswoman, Melissa Fleming, said that the situation was developing into “a human tragedy of unimaginable proportions”.
The executive director of the World Food Programme, Josette Sheerhan, said that it was trying to feed more than six million of the most vulnerable people in the region. “But resources are thin, and at the very moment that we should be ramping up operations, we have been scaling back some programmes in Ethiopia and Somalia.”
She said that although the “slowly evolving regional hunger crisis may not have the immediate impact of a mega-emergency like the Haitian earthquake or Pakistan floods”, the situation in the Horn of Africa was affecting more people. “Its effects are equally devastating.”
Tearfund has called for people to pray for the situation, as well as to donate. Richard Lister, the agency’s head of region for East Africa, said: “There has been widespread loss of crops and livestock, and the impact of the drought has been worsened by high food prices, and, in some areas, conflict.”
Tearfund’s disaster management director, Robert Schofield, called for urgent international action to address climate change, which meant that crises such as these were “going to occur more frequently, and will be worse each time”. The charity has been lobbying G20 leaders to tackle high global food prices and protect the most vulnerable people.
The British Government will provide emergency food relief for 1.3 million people in Ethiopia, the International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, announced on Sunday. He said that the Government was acting quickly “to stop this crisis becoming a catastrophe”.
He urged the rest of the international community to provide “fast, effective relief” for the region. He also called on the Ethiopian government to release up-to-date figures of the number of people facing severe hunger.
Save the Children has launched an appeal for the region, as has Oxfam, which is asking for £50 million — its largest-ever emergency appeal for Africa.