There must be better ways of preparing to meet the repeated threat of famine
NEARLY 19m people are short of food in the Sahel, the vast stretch of dry land on the southern fringe of the Sahara desert. According to the UN, more than 1m children under the age of five are at risk of dying; another 3m, it says, are “acutely malnourished”. On June 19th it asked the world’s richer countries to find $1.6 billion to help keep starvation at bay.
This is the third big food crisis to hit the region in seven years. This one has been triggered by drought, a poor harvest last year, high food prices, and insecurity in Mali, one of half a dozen Sahelian countries (see article). The reasons were much the same in 2005 and 2010. Even in non-crisis years, Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency, says it deals with 870,000 cases of extreme malnutrition in the region.
Carlos Oya of the School of African and Oriental Studies in London says this chronic insecurity is a result of policy failure, not nature. Irrigation in the region is inadequate. Governments fail to build up proper grain reserves. Even a country like Zimbabwe, which is blighted by political strife at the other end of the continent, keeps reserves of about 400,000 tonnes of maize.
Development agencies also share some of the blame. Though they are getting better at responding fast when an alarm is raised, emergency food aid often makes only a marginal difference. What the Sahel really needs is to make itself able to cope with the recurrent threat of famine.
The main requirements are long-term agricultural improvements as well as institutions and safety-nets to respond to food crises fast—cash-for-work programmes, for instance, or food vouchers to stop people selling their animals out of desperation.
Aid agencies and donors now talk about building up “resilience”—a new buzzword. In September 2011 the Sahel Working Group, a coalition of development and aid outfits, published an influential report on the subject. The European Union recently followed suit.
Rob Bailey, a food-security expert at Chatham House, a London think-tank, says that, although the idea of resilience is not new, it calls for a change in development thinking. Humanitarian and development programmes are often divorced from each other. Emergency aid can only be released once a crisis has been formally declared, whereas development funding tends to follow rigid plans and timelines. Mr Bailey argues that development programmes should instead be devised so they can “flex” in times of crisis and provide emergency relief.
This may be starting to happen. USAID, America’s government aid agency, now includes “crisis modifiers” in some of its programmes. Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency, has been using its emergency-nutrition programme to improve postnatal care in public-health centres across the Sahel. Lutheran World Relief, a charity, is running cash-for-work schemes in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, in which workers build irrigation systems and replenish the soil. And UN agencies are trying to convince donors that froze development funding to Mali in the wake of a coup there to shift some of their resources to “resilience building”.