@newspaperarticle {67806,
	title = {Famine in Somalia: What Can the World Do About It?},
	year = {2011},
	month = {Aug 2, 2011},
	publisher = {The Atlantic},
	abstract = {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{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}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.},
	url = {http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/08/support-for-farmers-in-africa-dried-up-long-before-somalias-famine/242960/},
	author = {Paarlberg, Robert L.}
}
