Worst crisis in decades, agencies say
Peter Goodspeed, National Post
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
The Humanitarian Coalition, which includes CARE Canada, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Quebec and Save the Children Canada, warns East Africa faces "a perfect storm of crop failures, a multi-year lack of rain, conflicts and political turmoil," which now threatens 20 million people with severe hunger.
In Somalia, where recent fighting between Islamist rebels and Somali government forces backed by African Union peacekeepers has claimed the lives of 2,000 civilians, half the population already needs food assistance and one in five children is severely malnourished.
But fierce new fighting in Mogadishu now threatens a further deterioration in the humanitarian situation and is sending a fresh wave of refugees fleeing.
On Monday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced that more than 250,000 people have been displaced by fighting in Somalia since May, pushing the number of displaced people in the country to 1.55 million.
According to the aid agencies, most of the displaced are women and children who are living without access to water, sanitation or medical care in crowded and badly managed camps in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.
The Dadaab camp in northeastern Kenya, which was intended to hold 90,000 people, is now one of the world's largest single concentrations of refugees, with almost 300,000 people.
Oxfam officials recently described the camp as "barely fit for humans," saying half the people in the camp have no access to water and women and children rarely have access to adequate latrines.
Yet Oxfam predicts another 100,000 refugees may flee increased fighting in Somalia this year and seek safety in Kenya.
For the fourth year in a row, East Africa is in the grip of a devastating drought, which is killing crops, livestock and children, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
"The rainy seasons successively have been poor, then you have the other problems of post-election violence in Kenya, the war in Somalia and the inability to plant crops. All of this increases food insecurity," said Stephen Gwynne-Vaughan, the head of CARE's Kenya office.
"The resiliency of these people has just been stretched beyond its limits," he said. "They can't take any more shocks."
But in the face of one of the world's worst ongoing humanitarian tragedies, the international community has been slow to respond. A UN-led emergency appeal for $576-million in relief aid for Eastern Africa remains only 28% funded.
Fighting in Somalia has also made it difficult to distribute aid to hundreds of thousands of displaced people in south-central Somalia.
One of the worst-affected areas is a 15-kilometre strip of land near the town of Afgooye, 30 km southwest of the capital, Mogadishu. Originally a town of fewer than 20,000, it now has a population of 524,000 displaced people who fled fighting in Mogadishu and camped along the road from the city.
Source: National Post, Sept 09, 2009