In Somalia today, there are ominous parallels with 1992: pervasive
fighting among rival clans, far too little rain, and an inability among
international peacekeeping forces to restore order or ensure that food
aid reaches those in need. Nineteen years ago, the result was the death
by starvation of 300,000 Somalis. Will it happen again?
It doesn't have to. But everything depends on how the world responds.
In
some ways, the current situation is more complicated. One reason lies
outside of Somalia altogether: the painful set of memories associated
with our attempts to help in 1992, particularly in the United States.
Then, the U.S. response was a forceful military intervention. President
George H.W. Bush dispatched 25,000 American troops to Somalia, allowing
food deliveries to resume, and preventing as many as 200,000 additional
deaths. But in October 1993,
famously,
two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu, 18 U.S.
soldiers died, and the body of one dead American was dragged
triumphantly through the streets. Public outrage forced President
Clinton to terminate the mission. As a consequence, it's unlikely that
U.S. policy makers will come close to taking similarly dramatic steps
today.
Meanwhile, two factors on the ground in Somalia itself
threaten to make the current crisis more dangerous than the previous
one. First, the drought is much worse this time -- perhaps the worst of
its kind in 60 years. Second, there is now an Islamist militant
organization,
Al-Shabab,
controlling the southern region of Somalia, where the drought has been
most severe. The 2 million people living in this region cannot get food
aid, because Al-Shabab's leadership, which brags about its close ties to
Al-Qaeda, distrusts food-aid workers as spies. The propaganda they
project among those living under their control is that it is better to
starve than to accept help from the West.
Under these seemingly
intractable circumstances, what can those outside Somalia do to prevent
mass deaths on the scale of the 1990s? Setting up relief camps in
neighboring countries and waiting for starving Somalis to walk across
the border is not a good option, because many do not survive the trip,
and those that do become helpless refugees. Camps along Somalia's
borders with Kenya and Ethiopia already hold 500,000 destitute people.
Paying large bribes to Al-Shabab fighters could get some food through on
the ground, but it is obviously not a sustainable solution, among the
reasons being that the government agencies financing the aid will not
ultimately tolerate it. Dropping food from UN airplanes will help, but
not nearly on the scale needed to make a significant difference.
The
best policy option that the international community has available to it
in Somalia is to support as much as possible the feeding operations now
underway in the sizeable territories not controlled by Al-Shabab. The
United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is currently feeding 1.5
million people in Somalia, including 300,000 in Mogadishu itself, but
these operations are constantly in danger of running out of resources.
For the Horn of Africa as a whole, WFP is facing a funding shortfall of
$252 million, so those wishing to help can start by focusing on ways to
make up this shortfall.
The international community can also do
things beyond Somalia, and indeed beyond the exigencies of emergency
food aid. Rich nations, including the United States, can start by
delivering the support they have promised to build Africa's own
food-production capabilities. Small farmers throughout sub-Saharan
Africa need help to boost their productivity. If you visit a typical
farming community in Uganda, or Kenya, or Cameroon, or Benin, most of
those you meet will be women, most will be illiterate, and most will be
living at least a 30-minute walk from the nearest paved road. As well,
most will be farming with hand hoes, no irrigation, no electrical power,
no modern seeds, and no veterinary medicine for their animals. These
women are hardworking and highly resourceful, yet the returns on their
labor are minimal because they have so little to work with. Their cereal
crop yields are only one-tenth as high as those in Europe or North
America, their average income is only $1 a day, and one-in-three of them
is undernourished.
What these farming communities need, above
all else, is increased public investment in rural roads, electrical
power, irrigation, clinics, schools, and agricultural research. But in
recent decades, most African governments failed to make these
investments because of a lack of international support. Between 1978 and
2006, the share of World Bank loans that went to agricultural
development fell from 30 percent to only 8 percent.
The United
States has also reduced its aid to small farmers since the 1980s. U.S.
official development assistance to agriculture in Africa fell from $400
million annually in the 1980s to only $60 million by 2006. The political
right promoted this abandonment of agricultural-development assistance
on the erroneous assumption that private investment alone could do the
job. The political left went along on the equally erroneous belief that
modernizing African farming might be bad for social justice and the
environment.
As international donors walked away from long-term
agricultural-development efforts in Africa, per capita food production
fell, leading predictably to an even greater need for emergency food
aid. By 2006, perversely, the United States was spending 20 times as
much shipping free food to Africa as it was spending to help Africans
produce their own food.
A shock of much higher world food prices
in 2008 finally led donors to promise revived support for Africa's
smallholder farmers. President Obama announced in 2009 that he would ask
Congress for a doubling of U.S. agricultural-development assistance
worldwide, up to more than $1 billion by 2010. Later that year, at a
summit meeting of the G8, he convinced the world's rich nations to
pledge $22 billion collectively over three years to promote food
security and agricultural development. By 2010, however, donors in
Europe were facing a debt crisis, opted for budget austerity, and began
backing away from these promises.
In the United States, the right
- and the Tea Party movement, in particular -- began demanding budget
cuts as well. In fiscal year 2011, Congress accordingly cut the expected
U.S. contribution to a new Global Agricultural Food Security Program
from $400 million down to only $100 million. And now a House
Appropriations subcommittee has just cut FY 2012 funding for the Obama
Administration's Feed the Future program by 18 percent. Only about half
of 1 percent of our federal budget goes to poverty-focused foreign aid,
so cutting these programs will have no significant budget impact at home
-- only damaging humanitarian effects abroad.
In Somalia, if
these effects are to be prevented from cascading into a full-scale
disaster of the kind the country suffered through in the 1990s, the
international community will have to focus as much effort as possible,
as quickly as possible, where we can be most effective. This will mean
covering shortfalls to protect current WFP feeding operations in the
Horn of Africa. But also, especially from the United States, it will
mean delivering on promised support for farming across Africa (which in
turn will depend on Congressional appropriations committees feeling as
much pressure as the U.S. public can muster that they deliver on this
promised support). Around the Horn of Africa today, roughly 11 million
people face food risks, while on the continent as a whole there are now
an estimated 390 million Africans consuming less than the nutritional
target of 2,100 calories per day. Most of these hungry people are
farmers. Understanding what they need for a sustainable response to the
food crisis they face, and responding to that need directly, will be the
pivotal challenge in alleviating African famine.