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The
battle against the latest round of starvation and famine in
the Horn of Africa has been fought successfully, but the war
against the extreme poverty and economic hardship that formed
the backdrop to the crisis in 2000 has by no means been won.
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"The
worst of the drought may be over but for this Borana
woman, the future remains uncertain"
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Looking
beyond the newly green pastures that have come with the season
of long rains are millions of pastoralist families whose futures
hang in the balance following three years of drought. In Kenya
alone, more than four million people will face severe difficulties
if food aid and other relief assistance are not forthcoming
and extended until the end of the year.
A
little over a year ago, international media attention was
focused on Gode in the
Ethiopian Somali region, where thousands of destitute pastoralists
had gathered in search of food aid. Following generally favourable
rains, the picture today appears very different, with signs
that livestock are recovering and milk production is on the
rise. Pockets of extreme need still persist, however, and
there are upwards of 100,000 people who remain stranded in
makeshift camps, where they are dependant on relief handouts.
In
Somalia, malnutrition rates are
high throughout much of the south, and the UN World Food Programme
(WFP) has issued an alert on expected food shortages as poor
rains in the south-central regions threaten the country's
main grain harvest. The first signs of hardship have already
emerged, with some poorer families barely able to afford one
meal per day, and others migrating to urban centres in search
of work.
The
donor response to appeals launched by the UN earlier this
year, however, has been disappointing. First was the Horn
of Africa regional appeal for US $353 million, launched in
March, then a number of individual UN country teams issued
appeals, some jointly with their host governments, others
separately. In total, relief needs in the region amount to
around US $700 million. While the donor response to the emergency
last year was considered generous at just under 70 percent
of total needs, this year food pledges are only around 40
percent of the requirement, and for recovery interventions
in water, health, livestock and agricultural production, the
response has been only a little over 21 percent.
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"The
total, if all country appeals are added together, sounds like
a great deal," says UN Regional Humanitarian Coordinator Bronek
Szynalski, "but it is less than US $54 per person.' With some
13 million people in the region still suffering from the effects
of drought, "54 dollars per person to put people back on track,
to help them regain their dignity, their normal livelihoods,
is not too much to ask," he adds.
"The cost of doing nothing is so big, and at the end of the
day you'll end up spending 10 times what you would have spent,"
said Fatuma Abdikadir, community development coordinator for
the Arid lands Resource Management project (ALRMP), a decentralised
office under Kenya's Office of the President.
More
than 20 million people in the Horn of Africa derive their
livelihoods from pastoralism, contributing millions of dollars
to the national economies of their regions. But the majority
lost cattle, sheep, goats and burden animals during the prolonged
drought, and although they received food aid they remain highly
vulnerable and have yet to recover their livelihoods to a
degree that is sustainable through the end of the year, relief
workers say.
"People
rush in [to help], and the minute it starts raining they just
walk away," Abdikadir said. "If these people have lost their
livelihoods, that is the economic base for education, for
feeding themselves, for improving themselves in any way. The
livestock is their bank, is their asset. With the erosion
of that asset, you have nothing left."
The
evidence of the devastation caused by the drought is scattered
across the Horn, stretching from Kenya to Ethiopia and Somalia
and into Eritrea and Djibouti.
Herds are smaller, an increasing number of people have moved
into semi-urban areas, and makeshift camps of destitute families
remain scattered throughout the region. There are also many
contradictions: milk production has recovered since the start
of the rains yet malnutrition rates remain high; the volume
of relief food has driven grain prices to record low levels,
yet many needy families still do not have enough to eat; recent
rainfall has been generally good, yet, in places, water supplies
are dangerously low and harvest failures imminent. Appearances
can be deceptive.
"If
the relief food stops we'd have to sell the animals to buy
cereal or maize," said Shaykh Umar, a pastoralist in Kenya's
northeastern Wajir District. He and his wife and children
travel with four other families seeking better pasture - preferably
areas that are not infested with disease-causing ticks. The
homes the families carry with them are constructed with sticks,
thatch, cloth, and worn-out bags that once held relief food.
Although Umar said he sometimes received help from family
members in Somalia or others to whom he provides teaching
from the Koran, traditional safety nets such as these have
slowly been breaking down, contributing to growing destitution
and poverty in the Horn of Africa region.
"People
are becoming more 'I' than 'we' oriented," Abdikadir said.
"Traditional systems are collapsing. They are not working
the way they used to. I think people are also poorer. The
ones who would have helped might not have enough now to help
their relatives."
Drought
has the effect of exacerbating such trends, increasing the
divide between rich and poor, inflaming conflicts over diminishing
resources, and driving nomadic people toward a more sedentary
and urban way of life. But drought is not the only hardship
faced by pastoralists in the Horn of Africa: poor roads and
communications, the absence of basic services, fragmented
markets, little or no economic diversification, and insecurity
are all symptomatic of chronic neglect and a lack of investment.
Making matters doubly worse, the reimposition of the ban
on the import of livestock from the region by Saudi Arabia
and other Gulf states in September 2000 has had a devastating
effect on livelihoods.
In
this web special IRIN looks at the legacy left by three years
of drought in the Horn of Africa, bringing a focus on the
lives and hopes of pastoralists in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia,
who are still struggling to recover in the aftermath of last
year's crisis. It looks at the ways those affected by the
drought are working to rebuild their lives, and examines how
the aid agencies are helping people to overcome some of the
difficulties obstacles they face. In the aftermath of the
drought, in this web special IRIN also takes a look at measures
being adopted to tackle some of the factors which are thought
to have exacerbated the crisis of last year - measures such
as the inter-agency initiative sponsored by the UN Secretary-General
to mobilise collective action to eliminate the chronic food
insecurity that has dogged the Horn of Africa for a generation.
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