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| Displaced Somalis stand in a queue waiting to be served with cooked food in Hodan district, south of the capital Mogadishu, as famine had spread to six out of eight regions in southern Somalia, Sept. 5, 2011. REUTERS/Feisal Omar |
Source: alertnet // Megan Rowling
By
Megan Rowling
LONDON
(AlertNet) - Governments are failing to prevent hunger emergencies in
developing nations, despite ample warning, because they see more political
danger than reward in acting early to avert famine, a report from the Chatham
House thinktank said on Friday.
To
prevent further food crises like those that hit millions of people in the Horn
and Sahel regions of Africa in the past two years, the misalignment between
political and humanitarian risks must be addressed, or aid needs will
increasingly go unmet because drought-related hunger is affecting growing
numbers of people in Africa, the report said.
"Rapid
population growth, low levels of political inclusion, low agricultural yields
and rapid environmental change mean the risk of food crises in the Horn and
Sahel is increasing," said the report from the London-based Royal
Institute of International Affairs. "Conflict and geopolitics act as risk
multipliers, meaning that full-blown famine remains a serious threat."
Drought-related
food crises are the most deadly of all natural hazards and are estimated to
have cost between 1 and 2 million lives since 1970.
The
report explains why the international aid community is still dragging its feet
on early warnings, even though these have improved considerably. For example,
alerts were issued for 11 months before famine was finally declared in Somalia
in July 2011, and the relief system was mobilised, it said.
One
of the main reasons was political, as Western donor nations feared their aid
could end up supporting the Islamist militant group al Shabaab, considered a
terrorist organisation by Washington, according to the report. "From a
donor perspective, the risk of humanitarian aid being captured by al Shabaab
took priority over the risk of a humanitarian catastrophe in Somalia," it
said.
Another
worry for wealthy governments is being accused of wasting taxpayers' money on a
crisis that never happened, said Rob Bailey, senior research fellow at Chatham
House and the report's lead author.
"That
results in a set of funding institutions and decision-making processes in donor
agencies, the U.N. and NGOs that seek to minimise those (political) risks at
the expense of not really dealing with the risk of famine at all," he told
AlertNet.
In
practice, this means centralised decision-making, onerous reporting systems,
delays in releasing aid cash until it is too late, and a lack of willingness to
experiment with new ways of doing things, Bailey added.
But
the blame does not only lie with the international community, the report said.
SHAMED
INTO ACTION
Governments
in countries at risk of food crises are also guilty of ignoring warnings and
playing down the severity of a situation. That may be because they don't want
to harm their record on reducing hunger, or because they have little incentive
to protect vulnerable communities which are often politically marginalised.
In
2011, when poor, sparsely populated northern Kenya was hard hit by drought,
Nairobi was widely criticised for its slow response. The government was
eventually spurred into action, partly by a campaign launched by Kenyan media
and businesses encouraging the public to make donations via mobile phone,
Bailey said, pointing to the potential for a free press and civil society to
make a political difference.
Similar
dynamics were at work internationally when, soon after, more than 18 million
people across West Africa faced a major food crisis.
"In
the case of the Sahel last year, there was very clearly a big sense of shame
about what had happened in the Horn of Africa and particularly Somalia, and
people were openly talking about the need to show that we've learned
lessons," Bailey said. This led to a certain amount of early action that
prevented a downward spiral into famine, he added.
"It
worked in a way, but I don't think fundamentally anything has changed in terms
of the underlying institutions, the operational capacities. It was about
managing political risks rather than anything else, and on that occasion the
political risk calculus favoured early action," the food security expert said.
The
report suggests reforms that could generate greater political will for early
action on food crises. Key recommendations include making governments more
accountable to vulnerable groups, and supporting communities to protect
themselves from drought and hunger.
A
larger share of international emergency response funds should be channelled
into preparing for and avoiding disasters, and more long-term backing given to
innovative ideas such as drought insurance, Bailey said.
The
report calls for the development of "resilience labs" where
governments, aid agencies and early warning providers could team up to test new
approaches and demonstrate success.
Donor
countries could also work out a better system for sharing the responsibility to
act on warnings and responding in a more coordinated way. And they could
communicate to their voters at home that acting to prevent a crisis costs less
than waiting for it to happen, Bailey said.
"The
trickier stuff is how you shift incentives so that decision makers are going to
be properly rewarded for taking decisions to respond early, and feel that they
have cover in the event that those decisions - every now and again - prove not
to be necessarily the right ones," he said.
The
report, Managing Famine Risk: Linking Early Warning to Early Action, is being
launched at Chatham House on Friday.
