FORMER PRESIDENT Mary Robinson will travel today to northern Kenya to highlight a massive drought-inflicted hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa that aid agencies believe has been largely ignored until now.
The worst drought to hit the region in six decades means food shortages are affecting up to 12 million people in rural communities, especially in southern Somalia, northeastern Kenya, southeastern Ethiopia and Djibouti.
The UN has yet not declared a famine but it is understood that, given the situation has now grown particularly acute in certain parts of Somalia, it is likely to do so this week.
“The whole international community should now realise the scale of what is happening in the Horn of Africa and put their shoulder to the wheel and do everything they can to help,” Britain’s international development secretary Andrew Mitchell told a press conference in Nairobi yesterday. “It is a terrible thing in our world today that a baby should die from lack of food,” he added.
Large swathes of the region have already been classified as in crisis or emergency, with malnutrition affecting up to 40 per cent of children under five.
Unicef yesterday called for an immediate expansion of assistance across the worst-affected communities, to address what it said were the “dire” needs of more than two million children, of whom half a million are at imminent risk of dying.
It warned with no improvement in overall food security conditions expected before early 2012, the crisis was likely to worsen.
“What we are seeing here is almost a perfect storm – conflict in Somalia, rising fuel and food prices, and drought and the loss of the rain. Now we are going to go another four to five months before there will be a harvest and we all have a huge job ahead,” Unicef’s executive director Anthony Lake said yesterday.
Mr Lake was speaking at the end of a four-day mission to Kenya. “In many of the poorest communities people are either too poor or too weak to be able to try to walk for help.”
Mrs Robinson, who will be accompanied by the chief executives of Concern, Trócaire, and Oxfam Ireland, will spend three days in the region in a visit that echoes her groundbreaking trip to famine-stricken Somalia in 1992.
What she witnessed then prompted her to make a tearful appeal to the international community to act.
Mrs Robinson is due to travel today to northern Kenya, where the plight of subsistence farmers and pastoralists dependent on the rains for their survival has worsened to an alarming degree.
In some parts of the region it has not rained for several years and there are fears the drought may persist.
Later this week, Mrs Robinson will travel to Dadaab, a refugee camp labelled the world’s largest, near Kenya’s border with Somalia. The sprawling camp, which was established in the early 1990s to accommodate those fleeing the civil war in Somalia, was designed to cater for 90,000 people, but the UN estimates there are now more than four times that number at Dadaab. Such is the influx of those escaping starvation in Somalia’s southern belt, aid agencies are struggling to cope with the overwhelming needs. One-third of new arrivals are mothers and children.
Mr Mitchell, who was speaking after he visited Dadaab, recalled seeing refugees weak with hunger after days of walking to reach the camp. Many had survived attacks by bandits and thieves. Others lost relatives along the way.
“I have never before seen a collection of so many mothers and children completely silent,” he said.
“I saw the feet of some of the children and mothers covered in cuts and blisters. It was amazing that they could move at all on feet that have been so badly injured.”
Mr Mitchell also criticised what he described as “derisory [aid] offers from rich European countries”. At the weekend Britain pledged £52 million (€59.3 million) in emergency aid. Germany pledged a further €5 million.
Ireland last week allocated an additional €1 million in funding for emergency food relief and assistance across the region. The Government has provided some €5.6 million to assist in the crisis since the beginning of the year.