Somalia needs assistance even in a bumper harvest year, according to official from FAO's Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit
NAIROBI (AlertNet) - Famine was declared in parts of Somalia on July 20, 2011 and officially ended on Feb 3 this year.
The United Nations says 2.3 million Somalis still need humanitarian assistance and the war-torn Horn of Africa nation risks slipping back into famine.
AlertNet’s Katy Migiro spoke to Grainne Moloney, chief technical officer for the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU), who was in charge of this analysis.
Q: Did the famine end because of the rains or the aid?
A: Everybody’s combined effort worked to bring down those terrible indicators. If they didn’t come down, how would we explain where half a billion dollars went?
We expected cereal prices to increase from October until the end of December but they started coming down. The only factor that is responsible for that is humanitarian assistance, nothing else.
The rains did not increase food supply until January because the harvest is only just coming now.
Q: Just four days before you announced the end of the famine, the militant Islamist group al Shabaab expelled the International Committee of the Red Cross, which was the main agency delivering food aid in southern Somalia. What impact will this have?
A: At this stage it’s too early to say. Most regions in the south have produced (a harvest) so they are not so reliant on assistance right now. They have their own supply at home right now for four to six months. If we were to see an impact it would be from April onwards.
In Bay and Lower Shabelle, their cereal stocks will run out after four months and then the next harvest isn’t until August. So by April maybe they are going to really struggle.
Q: What’s the likelihood of the April to June rains failing and famine returning?
A: The current outlook is saying (the rains will be) average but there’s a small risk that they will be below average. We’ll know by the end of February. They’ll only have a major impact on harvest if they are significantly below average.
In the worst case scenario, if for example, the next rains completely fail and there are more trade restrictions in certain regions where cereals can’t flow and if there’s a huge cholera outbreak or a measles outbreak, or all the refugees from Kenya decide to come back, if all these things happen at once, then yes, the situation could really spiral out of control and we could see a return to famine. But that would not be likely until the second half of the year.
Q: Can Somalia feed itself?
A: Somalia used to be one of the biggest exporters to Europe of bananas and coconuts. But now all those markets have dried up because the kind of infrastructure you need, you need to invest in.
The basic ability of the country to feed itself has been eroding for 20 years. Even in a bumper year, like 2010, we still had a significant cereal deficit. They need assistance even in a bumper harvest year.
The major drivers to the crisis are a collapsed nation (and) a lack of investment, especially in food production.
Q: What lessons should be learned from last year’s famine?
A: The response was six months late. Had it started six months earlier, we wouldn’t have had a famine. Some people’s lives could have been saved. But it took a famine declaration before we had a response that was equal to the needs.
We now know two consecutive failed seasons can lead to famine. And that will continue to happen. We know that droughts are coming more frequently and closely together.
How do we learn from how things got so bad last year and look at long term developmental and resilience interventions? That’s why money is still needed and that’s why attention has to still stay on the country.
Q: When did you see the warning signs?
A: The early warning started in August 2010. We started literally 12 months before the famine was declared.
Q: Who is to blame?
A: Everybody has to take responsibility for this delay. It wasn’t just donors. It wasn’t just lack of funding. There was also the fact that if we all had been screaming at the same time together, could we not have got more funds earlier in the year? And I think when people then politicise human suffering, that doesn’t help.
Q: Why were people so reluctant to speak out?
A: It is so difficult to operate in Somalia. You want to protect whatever little bit of access you have. And not interfere with that by trying to scale up. As soon as you scale up, you risk your own staff safety and, of course, being expelled.
Everybody desperately wants to be able to continue to work. But you will put that in jeopardy if you make it public. So there is a trade off between how much you can say and how much you can actually do.
Q: How do you know the famine is now over when FSNAU was banned from al Shabaab territory in November?
A: We have been working for 17 years throughout the country. We have a lot of complex networks to gather data. So when one information source is shut down, we can rely on another. We use a lot of satellite imagery.
In terms of the food security side, we have fairly good confidence in the data. Nutrition data is a problem. You have to actually take measurements, weights and heights. Given our staff movements are fully suspended, we cannot generate that information but rely on secondary data from health partners and other sources.
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