EU doubles famine aid to Africa in ‘race against time’
Crisis response commissioner Kristalina Georgieva announced the funding during a trip to Niger and Chad, according to a statement from the European Commission headquarters in Brussels.
The latest funding comes on top of a €10m package of food aid announced in November.
As many as 23 million people in Niger, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria and Burkina Faso began 2012 facing “huge uncertainty about how they will feed themselves and their families”, according to the EU executive.
Those most at risk and targeted by the aid include nearly 300,000 children under the age of two and pregnant and breastfeeding women.
More than a third of the money will be directed at Niger.
“We are now in a race against time,” said Georgieva, appealing to the international community to step up its contribution.
Brussels says a “conservative estimate” of the required funding would be €500m. Long-term Commission aid should reach €250m.
Erratic rainfall across the Sahel and increased rice prices on global markets combined to leave seven million people at “high risk” of food insecurity in 2012. Thousands of people, more than half of them children, died needlessly and millions of dollars were wasted because the international community did not respond to early warnings of an impending famine in East Africa, aid agencies said yesterday.
Most rich donor nations waited until East Africa’s crisis was in full swing before donating a substantial amount of money, said a report by Oxfam and Save the Children. A food shortage was predicted as early as August 2010, but most donors did not respond until famine was declared in parts of Somalia in July 2011.
The report, written by two prominent aid groups, even blamed aid agencies, saying they were too slow to scale up their response.
“We all bear responsibility for this dangerous delay that cost lives in East Africa, and need to learn the lessons of the late response,” said Oxfam head Barbara Stocking.
One Kenyan economist, though, said it would have been difficult to prevent the famine in south-central Somalia, which is mostly controlled by militants from al-Shabab, an insurgent group that has greatly limited the work aid agencies can do in the region.
“I don’t think the solution to famine is just sending money in good time,” said economist James Shikwati. “It also needs policy changes. Look at Somalia. [Even] if you have all the money in your pocket and all the grain in your store, unless al-Shabab allows you to access their areas then people there are still going to starve.”
Kenya and Ethiopia also suffered from the drought, but the famine hit hardest in areas of Somalia suffering from a combination of drought, war and high taxes levied by armed groups.
The aid agencies in the report said many donors wanted first to see proof that there was a humanitarian catastrophe. That caused a funding shortfall that delayed a large-scale response to the crisis by around six months.
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