Delayed famine response cost thousands of lives, say charities

THOUSANDS of needless deaths occurred and millions of extra dollars were spent because the international community failed to take decisive action on early warnings of a hunger crisis in East Africa, according to a report by the international aid agencies Oxfam and Save the Children.

The report, A Dangerous Delay, says a culture of risk aversion caused a six-month delay in the large-scale aid effort, because humanitarian agencies and governments were too slow to scale up their response to the crisis, and many donors wanted proof of a humanitarian catastrophe before acting to prevent one.

Early-warning systems first forecast a likely emergency as early as August 2010, but the full-scale response was not launched until July 2011 when malnutrition rates had gone far beyond the emergency threshold and there was high-profile media coverage of the crisis.