WASHINGTON, March 15 (UPI) -- Famine -- on a massive scale -- threatens millions if the international community fails to react fast enough to one of the worst droughts ever to grip the Horn of Africa. United Nations officials and aid workers concede, however, that relief work in the region has rarely been more difficult.
The head of the U.N. World Food Program, James Morris, warned earlier this week that more than 20 million people across Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Tanzania are on the verge of famine in what he called the worst conditions in his experience. He said WFP food banks were dangerously low and asserted the death toll will soar unless sufficient funding is received.
Morris' assessment was reiterated by Omar Abdul Haili, an International Committee of the Red Cross relief coordinator on the ground in southern Somalia, who told the BBC that hundreds of thousands of people could die if they don't get food in the next two months, adding: "I've never seen it this bad."
Recent reports from the aid group Oxfam attest the situation is so grave there that some Somali children have resorted to drinking their own urine.
The causes of the brewing crisis are complex, but global warming and deforestation head the list. The resulting steady decrease in rainfall that has afflicted the region over the past decade has led to slim harvests, water shortages and, in some areas, killed more than 80 percent of pastoralist livestock that depend on fertile grasslands for sustenance.
According to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a U.S.-funded program to predict and manage food insecurity, the situation is most severe in southern Somalia where an estimated 1.4 million people are in urgent need of humanitarian aid. The FEWS Net report said that an additional 400,000 refugees whose livelihoods depend on menial farm work and social support are also at serious risk.
But while Somalia is at the epicenter of the crisis, chronic instability in the absence of a functioning government, aid piracy and attacks on relief workers, and a general sense of apathy abroad in the wake of past interventions conspire to delay or altogether foil efforts to beat hunger.
Somalia, which has been without a central government for 15 years, is still riven by warring clans that have carved the country into rival fiefdoms, shattered infrastructure and blocked campaigns to deliver food aid and relief supplies.
The barren nation of 7 million has been at war with itself since the 1991 ouster of former military leader Mohamed Siad Barre. A U.S.-led U.N. humanitarian mission to restore order two years later backfired when a meeting of clan elders was bombed, plunging the capital, Mogadishu, into chaos. The street violence that followed took the lives of 18 U.S. servicemen and ended in a full withdrawal. To date, Western reluctance to get involved in the affairs of what governments deem to be failed or dysfunctional states on the continent is linked to a so-called "Somalia syndrome."
The crisis in Somalia is in some ways reminiscent of the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine that claimed nearly one million people; the West was slow to react when a drought emergency was declared, while the Ethiopian government spent its money on civil war.
An interim Somali government was formed in 2004, but leaders have been unable to work together, leaving power with a handful of hostile warlords who have kept the country awash with guns.
Lawlessness has allowed piracy to flourish in Somalia's shark-infested coastal waters, which have become among the world's most dangerous. Between March 2005 and late January 2006 there were more than 34 pirate attacks on commercial vessels, including two separate raids on WFP ships delivering food aid, according to the International Maritime Board.
After the second incident, in which a two-month supply of rice intended for Somali victims of the Asian tsunami was held for 100 days, the WFP opined the lack of authority in the country, calling "upon the community leaders, politicians and members of civil society... to intervene to end this ordeal peacefully, and no longer to stand passively by."
In a March 1 report to the U.N. Security Council, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the threat of piracy has forced the WFP to re-route much of its relief supplies overland to southern Somali through Kenya -- at far greater cost. But difficulties persist on land as they do at sea; most key roads that cross the country are in disrepair or have been destroyed by fighting, and banditry is rife nearly everywhere.
Dozens of relief workers have also been kidnapped, targeted by gunmen or killed by stray bullets.
Front-line humanitarian organization Medicins Sans Frontiers has been working in Somalia since 1991, but teams have been forced to temporarily, and at times, permanently evacuate areas due to the volatile state of security.
MSF mission head Colin McIlreavy said there is "no question about the need for humanitarian aid because Somalia has some of the worst health indicators in the world... But the needs have to be weighed up against the risk to our staff." Just two weeks ago, a U.N. Children's Fund staff member was released after being abducted by armed men in the south.
Despite the many risks involved in gaining access to the desperate, officials insist that acute food shortages will continue to plague Somalia and the region at large unless environmental woes are dealt with.
"We face a full-scale famine," Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, was quoted by the U.N. news agency. "We must feed and get water to the needy, but unless we tackle the root causes -- namely the damage of the peoples' natural or nature capital -- the problem will return again and again."
