Agro Perspectiva

World must fund famine-wracked Somalia to prevent generation dying, UN warns

26.08.2011 09:38 "Agro Perspectiva" (Kyiv) — African leaders convened a fund-raising conference yesterday for famine-wracked Somalia, where tens of thousands of people have already died and 3.2 million are on the brink of starvation, with a top United Nations official warning that the crisis stretches far beyond hunger to issues of health, protection and livelihood. «The future of an entire generation hangs in the balance,» Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro told the pledging conference hosted by the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. «If we do not respond, the consequences will reverberate for years. We will be asked how we stood by and watched a generation die, how we allowed a crisis to become a catastrophe, when we could have stopped it.» She noted that communities had already been shattered and a generation of orphans would bear the scars of hunger for the rest of their lives. Ms. Migiro stressed the multiple facets of the crisis, including public health, with disease, including cholera and measles, threatening to spread throughout Mogadishu, the capital, and beyond. «We must do everything to ensure that affected communities have enough clean water, medicine and hygiene supplies to stop it spreading further,» she said. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) yesterday warned that efforts to keep farmers and pastoralists on their feet, prevent the crisis from worsening and speed progress toward recovery are not being adequately funded. Support for activities outlined in FAO’s «Road map for Recovery» - a $161 million package designed to restore livelihoods and build the resilience of populations in the face of climate and other shocks - has so far been insufficient, with only $57.3 million paid up or in the pipeline to date, the agency said in a news release. It noted that high cereal prices continue in the Horn of Africa, as cereal supply is declining and will not be replenished until the year’s end, provided there is adequate rainfall. Livestock conditions continue to deteriorate, and the increasing burden of accumulated debts continues to erode both urban and rural households’ ability to purchase food. «We have the know-how, including frameworks, institutions, technology and human capacities to eradicate famine from the Horn of Africa, but we lack predictable resource flows to achieve that outcome,» states a document prepared for the Addis Abba meeting by the AU in collaboration with the three Rome-based UN food agencies - FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP).