Famine in Africa - Help those in need to survive

The horn of Africa is again in serious trouble, on the verge of massive famine, even worse than the famine that ravaged Ethiopia in the 1980s.

Aid agencies have launched appeals for relief to tackle the humanitarian crisis that has left at least 12 million people in dire need of assistance.

The past year has been the driest year since 1951 in pastoral regions of Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Uganda. The drought has decimated livestock and forced food prices to soar. The World Food Programme has called the latest crisis a “creeping disaster”.

Somali refugees arriving in Ethiopia have been showing signs of severe malnutrition, over five times the level of what would normally be categorised as constituting an emergency. More than 1,000 people a day are streaming from Somalia into Kenya, which is facing famine problems of its own. There are some 367,000 Somali refugees in Dadaab, Kenya.

Cereal prices have soared in Kenya, where the government claimed that it had surplus grain when the impending crisis was mooted last year, but in May, it declared a national disaster. It seems that the surplus grain was already sold off to neighbouring countries.

Famine scenes in Ethiopia in the early 1980s shocked the people all over the world. Bob Geldof pricked the consciences of people everywhere by inspiring and helping to arrange the Live Aid Concert to highlight the need for effective help. Yet the current crisis threatens to be on a much larger scale.

The European Commission agreed recently to provide €10 million in food aid to North Koreans on the brink of starvation. It arranged with the Pyongyang government to secure unprecedented direct access to the people so that the food goes straight to those most in need.

Last year, the World Food Programme pulled out of Somalia because so much of its aid was being taken by warlords who were distributing it among their own followers, or to those who could afford to buy it. Unfortunately in such distressed conditions, food is often used a tool of manipulation and control.

The crisis is a salutary reminder that despite our current economic problems, we are really quite fortunate, especially when one realises that little over a century-and-a-half ago, the Great Famine ravaged this country. It should never have happened, because only the potato crop failed. Other crops grew normally and there was no shortage of fish in our seas, or cattle in our fields. It was only the people who depended solely on the potato who were initially hit by the famine, but ultimately it hit every family, because the biggest killer in the Great Famine was not hunger, but disease.

Cholera and typhus epidemics ravaged communities, and such diseases often had a greater impact on those who were comparatively wealthy and well nourished, because they would not have been exposed to such diseases before. The poor who had survived into adulthood would often have built up some natural resistance having been exposed to those diseases over the years.

Humanitarian compassion for fellow humans in dire need should inspire our people and our government to act and to speak out loudly in order to ensure the people in Africa facing this horrific crisis receive the necessary help.

We should also remember, of course, that famine and disease are virtually synonymous. If only for our own self-protection we should be concerned about what is happening in Africa, because, effectively, the world is a much smaller place than it was in the mid-19th century.