NAIROBI, Kenya (IRIN) - It may have taken another brush with famine, but a serious commitment is finally emerging to eliminate hunger in the Horn of Africa, considered to be one of the most food insecure regions in the world. At a three-day consultative meeting in Nairobi in early July, government experts and international aid organisations vowed to move forward a UN-sponsored initiative to develop country-based and regional food-security strategies and boost investment in the drive to reduce poverty - seen as being at the root of many of the problems facing the region. "We cannot go on with these endless cycles of disaster and despair... something has to change," said one food security expert at the conference.

Of the 160 million people who live in the Horn of Africa, more than 40 percent are undernourished, and in Eritrea and Somalia the proportion rises to 70 percent. In the past 30 years, the seven countries taken (by the meeting) to make up the Horn of Africa - Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda - have been threatened by famine at least once in each decade. Even in normal years, these countries do not have enough food to meet peoples' needs.

Chronic food insecurity has a devastating effect on children. In Ethiopia, two-thirds of children are growth stunted; in Somalia, one child in five dies before its fifth birthday. In these precarious circumstances, any external shock - be it drought, flood or an invasion of migratory pests - can be disastrous. In 2000, a region-wide drought placed an estimated 16 million people - 10 percent of the population - in a desperate situation.

Among the most vulnerable groups are the 15 to 20 million pastoralist who eke out a living in the vast and typically arid lowlands that characterise much of the region. For the vast majority, just to survive is a daily struggle; to prosper, a distant dream. In the past, droughts occurred perhaps once every decade, and the traditional nomadic way of life was well adapted to take such hardships in its stride. In recent years, however, pastoralists say both the frequency and severity of droughts in the Horn have increased, and this has parallelled a dramatic decline in their own economic wellbeing and food security.

Serious droughts now occur every three to four years, devastating herds and progressively undermining the traditional way of life. With each successive crisis, more families are forced to migrate to the urban centres, resulting in further impoverishment and increasing dependence on charity and relief food hand-outs.

A legacy of neglect

The year 2000 was a good example: international assistance helped prevent a major famine, but could not prevent livestock losses that were estimated at more than 50 percent in some locations. Having lost everything, large numbers of pastoralists became stranded in relief camps. Many remain living in rough shelters set up on the fringes of towns throughout the region.

The 2-4 July Nairobi meeting, convened by the World Bank, was the culmination of many months of work by a high-level task force formed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the height of last year's drought emergency in the Horn. Convened under the chairmanship of Food and Agriculture (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf, the task force was given the job of examining the issue of food insecurity in the Horn of Africa from the broad perspective of poverty reduction, an approach which is at the centre of the strategy articulated in the declaration of the World Food Summit held in Rome five years ago.

In its report, "The elimination of food insecurity in the Horn of Africa", the task force draws a broad outline of how it sees the UN's response to the challenge of hunger, based on a diagnosis of the underlying causes of the problem. Alhough the causes of food insecurity are complex and vary from country to country, the task force was able to identify a number of common elements. According to the report, the largest group of food-insecure people are those farmers who live in remote areas, far from markets, and who typically have little land and few assets. Herding communities in the arid and semiarid lowlands form the second group. The increasing number of urban poor, many of whom have fled conflict and lack of opportunities in the countryside, form the third group.

The recommendations constituted the focus of the Nairobi meeting, and the task force enumerated a number of critical factors it regarded as causing hunger in the region. With more than half the people in the Horn of Africa surviving on an income of less than US $1 per day, poverty is seen as a fundamental challenge, leaving people with scant savings and few sources of income to fall back on when times are hard.

Prolonged drought, conflict, increasing population pressure, fragile national economies and weak and often over-centralised governments are also seen as factors contributing to food insecurity. Relief assistance may have saved lives, but has largely failed to address the underlying causes of poverty, and may even have fostered dependency, the report adds.

Environmental degradation and government neglect of rural areas also contribute to food insecurity. Many of the poor are concentrated in arid and semiarid areas, where they have no choice but to cultivate marginal land ever more intensively. The Horn of Africa has some of the world's lowest crop yields and, partly due to inadequate water control and lack of investment, less than one percent of the cultivatable area is irrigated.

Pastoral communities have often been neglected, and efforts by governments and international organisations to improve pastoral systems have often inadvertently done more harm than good. With few roads and poor communications, remote rural communities are typically isolated from the mainstream national economy and, with poor standards of health and education, the rural poor are at a distinct disadvantage compared to many of those living in the cities and towns.

A strategy for change

On the table for discussion at the Nairobi meeting were recommendations for major new investment and the implementation of supporting policy and institutional reforms as part of Country Food Security Programmes to be developed by each government. Also under scrutiny was a proposed Regional Food Security Programme, to be developed and implemented under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a grouping of Horn of Africa countries headquartered in Djibouti.

The basic building blocks for the country programmes will be a series of new projects and investments developed with the full involvement of community leaders, NGOs, local authorities and other grass-roots organisations. It is seen as essential that these programmes are integrated into the national poverty reduction framework agreed in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) and similar processes.

The full scope of the country programmes will depend on national priorities, but all will include activities for eliminating famine and building long-term food security. Central to each national strategy will be effective early warning systems that extend to community level, and which are linked to a rapid relief response and measures to boost agricultural productivity. They will aim to help provide for more diverse and secure forms of livelihood.

Given the urgency and complexity of the problems faced in the region, discussions at the Nairobi meeting stressed the importance of teamwork at every level. National food security teams to be formed by governments - supported by the UN - will undertake much of the work to increase the effectiveness of efforts already being made by countries to overcome hunger, combining long-term strategic planning with projects intended to have immediate impact. Country programmes would be conceived as "catalytic mechanisms" for coordinating and prioritising nationally and externally funded activities, boosting their effectiveness and identifying priorities for new investment and filling gaps.

There are also plans for extensive support at the international level. UN agencies and donors will work together to provide support directly to the countries concerned and to IGAD - which is expected to play a key role in coordinating action at the regional level. A regional investment programme and further consultations on the food security strategy will be undertaken by IGAD. Technical advice and support for the development of projects will come from a core team of experts to be drawn from the FAO and other UN agencies, while UN Resident Coordinators and their country teams on the ground will function as an advisory group to their partner governments and a source of specialist, technical support.

However, eliminating hunger in the Horn of Africa will require substantial financial resources. The task force argues that some funds can be generated locally if governments reallocate their budgets, particularly away from military expenditure. However, it is widely accepted that the region will also need external assistance for some years to come. The World Bank has been invited by the UN Secretary-General to take on the lead coordination role in mobilising international resources for the implementation of the strategy, and promoting dialogue between governments in the region and the donor community on issues relating to food security.

To make a real difference, any strategy to tackle food insecurity in the Horn of Africa will require concerted government action and considerable, committed international investment over "a period of at least 10 years", one regional analyst told IRIN after the Nairobi meeting.

A number of donors - such as the European Union and World Bank - are moving towards new forms of lending. These include budgetary support, Poverty Reduction Support Credits, and Community-Driven Development programmes, many of which will be integrated within the framework of priorities agreed in the PRSPs and similar national processes. Governments, too, are showing a willingness to tackle the issue of poverty and food insecurity through new policies and strategies formulated with greater participation of rural communities. More recently, pastoralists and other marginalised groups have been given opportunities by governments and the international agencies to participate in the development of the PRSPs.

Conclusion

This is not the first time there has been an attempt to change the relentless course of natural and man-made disaster in the Horn of Africa. In 1993 - in a spirit of new optimism - heads of state from the Horn of Africa met in Addis Ababa under the auspices of IGAD and pledged collective action to create conditions conducive to peaceful economic progress in the region. Three years later, further commitments were made at the World Food Summit in Rome to achieve food security for all and to halve the number of undernourished people in the world by 2015. However, for most people in the Horn, these events not only passed unnoticed but, in the intervening years, proved to have little or no impact on their lives. Indeed, for many, life today is harder than it was 10 years ago and levels of hunger and vulnerability have increased.

Yet, in the aftermath of another region-wide drought, and an end to the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, there is hope that a new momentum is building up to properly address the challenge of assuring food security in the Horn of Africa. Much still needs to be done to turn words and "commitments" into meaningful action. But donors and humanitarian agencies are anxious that the cycles of disaster in the Horn are properly tackled, to avoid the repeated need for massive international intervention. One participant at the Nairobi consultation told IRIN that "there is an urgency, a sense that something has to be done... What has been discussed here offers governments and the international community a new framework for working together to remove the burden of hunger from the Horn of Africa."