WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2011-07-25 Time: 21:00:02 Posted By: News Poster
By Meredith Strike
After a treacherous two-week journey from Somalia and eleven long days at the Dadaab camp, Bashir’s family still waits behind the fence, not officially registered as refugees and consequently unable to receive food rations on a regular basis. Bashir’s future and that of ten million other starving people in southern Somalia, northern Kenya, and the Somali and Oromiya regions of Ethiopia, remains highly uncertain.
The head of the UN Refugee Agency has called drought-stricken Somalia “the worst humanitarian disaster in the world,” while the Ethiopian government has appealed for $398 million in international assistance. There are mounting fears in Ethiopia that the current drought could engender the type of devastation that was left behind by the 1984 famine, in which one million people died. The current drought in the Horn of Africa is the fifth major threat to food security in the region since 2000.
Every day thousands of refugees flee Somalia and there are 1,300 new arrivals per day at the Dadaab camps alone. The Kenyan government, under pressure from the UN Refugee Agency, has agreed to open a new camp in Dadaab, as an estimated 380,000 refugees are now living in facilities intended to house just 90,000. The stories of children dying of starvation on their journeys to the overcrowded camps illustrate the vast scale of a tragedy that is likely just beginning, and there is no denying that the situation is being exacerbated by high food prices, climactic changes, and conflict that has prevented pastoralists from reaching land where rain had fallen.
Yet the crisis in many ways was predictable. According to Jonathan Bhalla of the Africa Research Institute in London, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has warned of food insecurity in the region every month since October, and “other aid agencies and non-governmental organizations have outlined the gravity of the present emergency since the beginning of the year,” says Bhalla. Every few years, successive rains fail in the Horn, resulting in drought and eventually the dire yet familiar warnings of famine. While environmental factors certainly trigger the crises, the recurring catastrophes are largely symptoms of the generally reactive, rather than pre-emptive, focus of both the international community and the governments of the region themselves.
Mr. Bhalla explains that the response to drought in the Horn has always been overwhelmingly focused on saving lives after the crisis has hit rather than trying to prevent or reduce the effects of the drought before the situation becomes an emergency. The international system, he says, “Only responds when signs of parched land, dying animals, and starving children are clear for us all to see.”
Threats to food security, said Daniel Maxwell, a professor at Tufts University and expert on food security, “have to be dealt with in a much more systematic manner, with greater emphasis on reduction of risk.” A changed response to drought is vital not only for the Horn region, but also for donors and agencies who repeatedly commit millions of dollars in humanitarian aid that would have been more cost-effective if used in a preventive capacity. The relief organization Oxfam estimates that emergency aid in famines costs seven times as much as the aid needed to prevent the disaster in the first place. However, unless governments and international organizations seek solutions that address the root problems of food insecurity in the Horn, its inhabitants will continue to suffer from recurrent hunger.
According to Mr. Bhalla, such solutions should be concentrated primarily on the protection of at risk pastoral livelihoods and the provision of additional resources for rural agriculture, even in times of good rain seasons. He argues that the provision of affordable credit, cash transfers, the safeguarding of migration routes and increased funding for drought-resistant crops, could all prove effective. Other experts have often cited social protection programs for the vulnerable and insurance schemes for farmers. Over the long term, investments in rural agriculture will not only increase food security, but will help the region to become commercially viable and even globally competitive.
The good news is that there does seem to be a shift away from reactive humanitarianism and towards sustainability and prevention. Disaster risk reduction programming, Maxwell explains, is “taking off across the region,” citing the Productive Safety Net Programme, launched in 2005 in Ethiopia, which provides cash-based social protection for food-insecure regions. NGOs such as CARE and Oxfam provide not only relief in times of crisis, but work-for-food safety nets and support for small farmers. Judith Schuler of the World Food Programme in Ethiopia explains that many actors on the ground, including the government, have become increasingly focused on long-term, sustainable solutions.
Ms. Schuler gives the example of MERET, a collaboration program between the WFP and the Ethiopian government in which chronically food-insecure communities participate in environmental rehabilitation and income-generating activities such as “reforesting barren hillsides, restoring springs and rainwater ponds, reconstructing agricultural terraces and building and rehabilitating feeder roads to improve access to markets.”
However, much remains to be done. These programs are in their infancy and their impact will likely remain unknown for some time. Long-term solutions will need to be implemented on a larger scale, for longer periods of time if they are to have significant effects in times of drought.
Original date published: 22 July 2011
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201107251796.html?viewall=1