LONDON (AlertNet) - What do Kenya, Afghanistan and North Korea have in common?
They're all on a list of countries judged to be in "protracted crisis", issued this week by the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). That means they suffer repeated food crises and an extremely high prevalence of hunger due to a combination of natural disasters, conflict and weak institutions.
The FAO has identified 22 nations it says are in "protracted crisis" across the whole or part of the country: Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Haiti, Iraq, Kenya, Liberia, North Korea, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
In laying out a clear definition for the first time, the FAO and U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) are hoping for an improvement in aid to those states. A country in "protracted crisis" is one that reports a food crisis for eight years or more, receives more than 10 percent of foreign assistance as humanitarian relief, and is on the FAO's list of "low-income, food-deficit countries".
In its "State of Food Insecurity in the World 2010" report, released this week, the FAO says the group of 22 countries are home to more than 166 million undernourished people - representing nearly 40 percent of the population of these countries and almost one-fifth of the world's hungry.
"This unacceptably high degree of hunger results from many factors, including armed conflict and natural disasters, often in combination with weak governance or public administration, scarce resources, unsustainable livelihood systems and breakdown of institutions," FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf and WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran wrote in a foreword to the report.
"Faced with so many obstacles, it is little wonder that protracted crises can become a self-perpetuating vicious cycle."
MORE NEED, LESS MONEY
It's also perhaps little wonder that, given the seemingly intractable nature of their problems, nearly two-thirds of these countries receive less development assistance per person than the average for other developing countries.
Farming accounts for around a third of the gross domestic product of countries in long-term crisis, and employs nearly two thirds of their populations.
Yet from 2005 to 2008, just 3.1 percent of official development assistance (ODA) received by these states was spent on agriculture, compared with an average of 5.8 percent for all least developed countries over the same period, the report says.
The same goes for education, with only 3.8 percent of ODA allocated to that sector in protracted crisis nations, far less than the average of 9.6 percent for least developed countries.
That leaves those suffering most from chronic hunger, ill health and illiteracy facing a pretty bleak future.
TARGETED APPROACH
It's time to rethink how protracted crises are handled, the report says, suggesting specially designed and targeted assistance.
Measures that could lead to better aid responses include:
"Current understanding of protracted crises remains superficial and narrow," the report notes. "While humanitarian emergencies clearly require rapid assessments of needs, protracted crises require analysis that is both broader and deeper."
The report was published after the FAO announced last month that the number of people suffering chronic malnutrition worldwide fell in 2010 for the first time in 15 years, but that volatile food prices could hamper efforts to fight hunger. About 925 million people are undernourished this year, down from a record 1.02 billion last year, which was the highest number in four decades.
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