Failure To Respond To Early Signs Of Famine Cost Lives

Lessons learnt can help prevent future disasters and save lives

As the warning signs of a new food crisis appear in West Africa, Oxfam and Save the Children have looked back at the human and economic cost of failing to heed these signs in 2010, with tragic results becoming all too clear in the Horn of Africa last year. Thousands of needless deaths occurred and millions of extra dollars were spent because the international community failed to take decisive action on early warnings of a hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa, according to a new report by the two international aid agencies.

The report, A Dangerous Delay, said a culture of risk aversion caused a six month delay in the large-scale aid effort because humanitarian agencies and national governments were too slow to scale up responses to the crisis, and many donors wanted proof of a humanitarian catastrophe before acting to prevent one.

Sophisticated early warning systems first forecast a likely emergency as early as August 2010 but the full-scale response was not launched until July 2011, when malnutrition rates in parts of the region had gone far beyond the emergency threshold and there was high profile media coverage of the crisis.

Save the Children and Oxfam said more funding for food emergencies should be sought and released as soon as the crisis signs are clear, rather than the current system which funds large scale emergency work only when hunger levels have reached tipping-point – by which time lives have already been lost and the cost of the response is much greater. The agencies are calling on governments to overhaul their response to food crises, as laid out in the Charter to End Extreme Hunger, a document that has received backing from key international figures.

"We all bear responsibility for this dangerous delay that cost lives in East Africa and need to learn the lessons of the late response,” said Oxfam’s Chief Executive Barbara Stocking.

“It’s shocking that the poorest people are still bearing the brunt of a failure to respond swiftly and decisively. We know that acting early saves lives but collective risk aversion meant aid agencies were reluctant to spend money until they were certain there was a crisis."

"We can no longer allow this grotesque situation to continue; where the world knows an emergency is coming but ignores it until confronted with TV pictures of desperately malnourished children," said Save the Children' s Chief Executive Justin Forsyth. “The warning signs were clear and with more money when it really mattered, the suffering of thousands of children would have been avoided. All governments should sign the Charter to End Extreme Hunger to help ensure a crisis like this can never happen again."

While some positive action by governments did take place – such as improved early warning systems and social protection schemes that meant families were given some early support – much more was needed across the region.

The UK government estimates between 50,000 and 100,000 lives were lost between April and August 2011, more than half of them children under the age of five. Today, Somalia remains the most acute food crisis in the world, with hundreds of thousands of people still at risk.

Some early action did take place but overall, the scale of crisis outstripped these efforts and more costly interventions had to be made at a later stage. Trucking five litres of water a day for five months to 80,000 people in Ethiopia as a last resort lifesaving measure costs more than US$3 million, compared to US$900,000 to prepare water sources for an oncoming drought in the same area.

Across East Africa, the provision of early support to keep animals healthy and markets functioning would have helped prevent soaring malnutrition rates, as hundreds of thousands lost livelihoods when their livestock was wiped out by drought.

The report, which comes ahead of global meetings at Davos and the African Union, is a timely reminder that the international community must act fast to avert disaster in West Africa, where a looming food crisis threatens to affect millions of people. A recent Save the Children assessment in Niger showed families in the worst hit areas were already struggling, with around one third less food, money and fuel than is necessary to survive.

Kofi Annan, Chair of the Africa Progress Panel said: “Achieving global food and nutrition security is the challenge of our time, and our success in alleviating widespread hunger will depend, in large part, on our ability to identify the early warning signs of food crises, and respond immediately and effectively.”

Further reforms to tackle hunger crises like the East Africa emergency are set out in the Charter to End Extreme Hunger, a joint-agency initiative, which urges governments to fulfil their responsibilities and take concrete steps to stop catastrophic food crises from happening again.

Notes:

1.Oxfam New Zealand’s Executive Director Barry Coates recently saw the Horn of Africa famine firsthand, visiting Oxfam programmes in Kenya, including in Dadaab and Wajir. For more information or interviews with Barry, please contact Lynda Brendish on 09 355 7413, 021 052 9293 or lynda.brendish@oxfam.org.nz.

2.The report A Dangerous Delay, is available on the Oxfam website at http://oxf.am/oQo and a summary of the report is available at http://oxf.am/oQJ.

3.Read the Charter to End Extreme Hunger, endorsed by Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs Kristalina Georgieva and other leaders including UK Development Minister Andrew Mitchell: http://hungercharter.org/

4.Oxfam press release on the looming West Africa food crisis is available at http://oxf.am/oMB.

5.Broadcast-quality footage and photographs of the Horn of Africa crisis and response are available.

6.Whilst it is impossible to calculate exactly how many people have died in the Horn of Africa crisis, one UK Department For International Development estimate suggests it could be between 50,000 to 100,000 people, more than half of them children under five. Another estimate, by US government, was that more than 29,000 children under age five died in the 90 days from May to July. Widespread support for livelihoods threatened by drought would have done much to prevent malnutrition taking hold. The death of livestock due to the drought wiped out the income of hundreds of thousands of families, leaving them unable to afford to buy enough food. Early supplementary feeding of livestock could have kept herds alive, markets functioning and could ultimately have helped prevent the malnutrition that killed so many.

7.According to UN OCHA, in southern and central regions of Somalia a standard measure of malnutrition (median Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) prevalence) increased from 16.4 per cent to 36.4 per cent in 2011. This means that GAM already exceeded the 15 per cent ‘critical’ threshold early in 2011.

8.Oxfam has reached about 1.5 million people in Somalia, 300,000 in Ethiopia and about one million in Kenya with clean water, sanitation services, therapeutic feeding for malnourished children, cash and livelihood support. Save the Children has reached more than 280,000 people in Somalia, in addition to more than one million in Ethiopia and over 440,000 in Kenya.

9.Early warning systems in the Sahel region show that overall cereal production is 25 per cent lower than the previous year, and food prices are 40 per cent higher than the five-year average. The last food crisis in the region, in 2010, affected 10 million people.

ENDS

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