A drought sweeping across East Africa has left millions of people at risk of starvation, in a region plagued by increasingly erratic rainfall, humanitarian organizations and officials warn.
Huge food shortages and loss of livelihood have left 6.2 million Ethiopians needing relief aid, while about 3.8 million in Kenya’s arid areas, where livestock is being decimated, have also been affected, UN agencies say.
War-ravaged Somalia is witnessing its worst humanitarian crisis since civil unrest erupted two decades ago, with a third of its 10 million people in need of food assistance and one in every five children acutely malnourished.
Three years ago, a searing drought put more than 11 million people in the region at risk of starvation.
For Kenya, “this is the worst [drought] in nearly a decade. One in 10 Kenyans are in need of food assistance,” said Marcus Prior, a World Food Programme (WFP) spokesman in Nairobi.
“The situation is extremely serious. Rains have failed across many areas,” said Prior, whose organization recently appealed for US$230 million to help drought victims.
In a region where small scale subsistence farming is the mainstay of a majority of the population, the impact of climate change on rainy seasons can often have dramatic consequences.
Response to drought disasters have similarly been erratic and short-term: appeals for donor aid, emergency food distributions and medical assistance, all of which quickly dry up when the first drops of rain fall. In the absence of permanent solutions, many of those affected by drought find no respite even when the rains come as floods sweep their homes, destroy crops and cause water-borne diseases.
Tanzania recently sent 40,000 tonnes of cereals to its northern regions affected by drought and where famine had been reported, Agriculture Minister Stephen Wasira said.
“There are pockets of famine in northern regions ... ‘Short’ rains failed and ‘long’ rains were inadequate,” Wasira said, referring to the two main rainy seasons.
The WFP is also feeding more than 1 million Ugandans, mainly in the northern and eastern regions as a prolonged drought weighs heavy on the people.
“If the rains do not [increase] in the next few days then we are headed for trouble,” Ugandan Information Minister Kabakumba Masiko said.
Ugandan livestock have also started dying and officials fear the trend will have a negative impact on meat and milk supplies to a large swathe of east Africa.
“We are losing animals due to starvation because of drought especially in the cattle corridors,” Ugandan State Minister for Animal Husbandry Bright Rwamirama told a news conference in Kampala on Thursday, but gave no figures.
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