CurrentEye

In an interview with NPR’s Melissa Block, Frist threw out numbers. Lots of them that put the situation in the Horn of Africa in some perspective. He said: This is the worst drought in 60 years; 29,000 children under the age of five have died in the past 90 days; tens of thousands are dead; 12 million people are at risk of death; 42 percent of them die from starvation.

Frist has seen human tragedy. He’s been to Rwanda during the genocide and saw the 1980 famine in the horn of Africa. He’s been to Chad, Darfur and Sudan but he says what strikes him about this particular crisis is that “the world is responding to the need itself but the need is increasing faster than the response.”

Listen to the story.

Xan Rice, Nairobi, The Guardian

Famine relief efforts in Somalia are being hampered as much by delays in procuring food aid and raising funds as by difficulties in accessing Islamist-controlled areas, according to humanitarian organisations working there.

The al-Shabab rebel group, which controls most of the south, including the main famine zones, has refused to lift the bans it has imposed on several humanitarian agencies over the past two years. Barred organisations include the World Food Programme, which usually leads drought responses.

But several other international aid groups, including Islamic Relief, Unicef, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are operating across the al-Shabab-controlled zones, as are numerous Somali non-governmental organisatons.

Staff at these agencies say the major problem in responding to the crisis is the time it is taking to buy food abroad and to transport it to the worst-hit areas.

The lack of food stockpiling in Somali reflects badly on the international humanitarian community, [Tony Burns, director of operations for Saacid] said, since the severity of the drought was known for many months before famine was declared in the Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions two weeks ago. A further three areas were added to the famine list on Thursday: parts of the Middle Shabelle region, the sections of Mogadishu that host communities who have fled their home areas, and the Afgoye settlements near the capital, which house 400,000 displaced people. 

The UN estimates tens of thousands have died from hunger-related causes across the country. Other countries in the Horn of Africa have also been hit by the drought, but it is the corrosive effect of 20 years without a government and civil war that has driven several million Somalis to the brink.

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