The Guardian has a useful table on who is contributing to famine relief in East Africa and who isn’t. Overall the appeals for the region for 2011 are 46% funded. Top marks to Australia, the EU Commission, Japan, UK and USA. Unclear why France or Germany are giving only a third as much as similarly sized countries; or why Italy has so far contributed a paltry $2.5 million, a full 5 cents per citizen. (Yes, there is a debt crisis; but Italy is presumably spending a great deal more trying to manage African refugees). Among resource producers, Saudi Arabia is generous to Somalia with $50m; Russia less so with $1m (what was their contribution in 1984 I wonder?). Finally, I noticed Sudan has contributed $2.5 million to Ethiopia, which is nice given the other problems they have to deal with, though it doesn’t quite defray the expenses of the several thousand Ethiopian troops keeping the peace on the north-south Sudan border.
I’d also be interested to see how private giving to the food crisis compares with other recent disasters (Asian and Japanese tsunamis, Haitian earthquake, etc). I can understand why people would be reluctant in this case. There is nothing less derserving about Somalis, Kenyans or Ethiopians than Japanese, Indonesians or Haitians, but I have a strong sense of “surely the experts should have seen this one coming?” and I feel that way, I imagine others do too. However, now we are in the situation we are in, private donations are clearly desperately needed. The ironic silver lining may be that this part of the world that has well-functioning systems in place to deliver large quantities of food aid quickly. That was not the case in Haiti or south-east Asia. With the exception of the Shabab-controlled regions of Somalia, where we should expect some inefficiency and leakage, I imagine that a very large proportion of aid, both in cash and in food, will reach those it is intended to reach.
Two other notes on why this situation has got so bad. First, the notoriously uncertain climate change estimates for this part of Africa may have red false complacency, or optimism about agriculture. (Most estimates suggest there will be more rain in the region as a whole, but that hides declines in rainfall, and increases in flooding, in different regions). Second, the Early Warning System that provides us with those colour-coded maps may be unhelpfully vague: it tells us how many people are at risk, but not what it will take to help them. Think of what is more useful to an aid official or policymaker: a prediction that 5 million people will be ‘starving’ by some date, or a forecast that 200,000 tonnes of food aid will be required between, say, May and October. The former grabs headlines but doesn’t lead to any action; the latter is dull but also practical.
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/test/map/flash/map55-ENGLISH.swf <!–
Finally, this excellent graphic from Oxfam helps dispel the myth that it is dry, dusty places that are most at risk from food insecurity. Occasional emergencies may be a problem; but chronic malnutrition is greater in mostly wet Haiti, Mozambique and Sierra Leone than in archteypical ‘famine countries’ like Ethiopia and Niger. Sadly Eritrea tops the table, with an alleged two-thirds of the population undernourished. Click on the tab on the right of the chart to see the proportion of food that most countries import. Many people in Europe might be surprised that landlocked Ethiopia and Niger (again) import less than 5% of their food, compared with over 50% in Haiti and Eritrea and a stunning 97% in Djibouti (which, to be fair, is a city state in a desert). I remain impressed at the ability of Nigerien and Ethiopian farmers to double food production in the last 25 years as their populations have doubled. How many other countries have doubled production in 25 years?
