The slow response to the 2011 crisis in the Horn of Africa claimed 260,000 lives in Somalia. Eleven years later, a host of factors, including drought, an increase in the cost of food never recorded due to the war in Ukraine, endemic conflicts and the economic burden of covid, condemns between 600 and 1,800 people to die every day of hunger in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, as reported by Oxfam Intermón and Save the Children in the report A dangerous delay: the price of inaction.
Once again, the NGOs warn of catastrophes due to passivity and the scarcity of resources to face hunger. On this occasion, they regret that while the international community has acted diligently to combat other nearby crises, in the case of the aforementioned three countries, the United Nations call to raise 4.4 billion dollars to finance the response has been derisory. So far, only 93 million have arrived, 2% of the amount requested, compared to the 1.9 billion emergency funds received in 2017. All the data that arrives is extremely worrying: the UN warns that 350,000 children could die this summer in Somalia if governments and donors do not act quickly. The number of people threatened by famine in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia is now 23 million, more than double the number in 2021.
Oxfam and Save the Children underline the discourse that has emerged in recent months. They applaud the speed shown by the international community to meet the demands of the population affected by the war in Ukraine, specifically “16,000 million dollars in one month” have been disbursed, and they denounce the inaction shown in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia “by renege on their promises of aid by taking them to the brink of bankruptcy due to their high level of indebtedness”. “People die of hunger not because there is a lack of food or money in the world, but because of an absolute lack of political will,” says Franc Cortada, director general of Oxfam Intermón.
The report prepared by the aforementioned organizations, in collaboration with the Jameel Observatory, studies how humanitarian action has evolved in situations such as the one in Somalia in 2011, and has concluded that the response is still “slow and limited to avoid that new catastrophes occur”.
And it is not that there is a lack of mechanisms to warn of the risk of famine. The document draws on the tool that classifies the seriousness of food security situations using a classification scale (IPC) that goes from 1, when access to food is, in general, adequate and stable , until the 5th, when a widespread famine already occurs. To make the forecasts, the authors have estimated the crude daily mortality rate at level 3, which is 0.5-0.99 per 10,000 people, from which the normal rate of 0.22 has been subtracted. Calculations based on these parameters indicate that in the three countries “between 627 and 1,802 deaths a day due to hunger are recorded, between one every 2.5 minutes and one every 48 seconds.” Oxfam and Save the Children emphasize that “these are conservative figures” since they are based on level 3 of the CPI scale, which detects a critical and accentuated lack of access to food, high rates of malnutrition and accelerated depletion of assets. that make up the means of subsistence.
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