According to a regional climate surveillance program, 23 million people are “acute food insecurity” in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.
Mo12345lemonde with AFP
Acute drought in the horn of Africa should worsen this year and threatens the region with a more serious famine than the one who killed hundreds of thousands of people ten years ago, warned on Wednesday 22 February, a regional climate monitoring program.
Forecasts of the rainy season scheduled for next March to May “show reductions in precipitation and high temperatures,” said the center of forecasts and climatic applications (ICPAC) in a statement for intergovernmental authority for Development (IGAD), a group of Eastern African countries. However, this rainy season contributes widely (up to 60 %) in total of annual precipitation in the equatorial countries of the horn of Africa.
These forecasts confirm the fears of meteorologists and help agencies to see this drought from unprecedented duration and severity to quickly cause a humanitarian disaster. “In certain parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda which were recently very affected by drought, it could be a sixth season of the aborted rains,” said the ICPAC.
The Horn of Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change, with increasingly frequent and intense attacks. The five seasons of the consecutive aborted rains have so far caused the death of millions of cattle, the destruction of crops, and pushed millions of people to leave their region to find water and food elsewhere. According to the ICPAC, the current conditions are worse than they were before the drought of 2011, with already 23 million people in “acute food insecurity” in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.
“Act before it is too late”
The last famine was declared in Somalia in 2011: some 260,000 people, half of whom are under the age of 6, died of hunger for lack of sufficiently rapid response from the international community, according to The UN. At the time, the region had experienced two seasons of consecutive aborted rains, against five today.
Wednesday, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres stressed that around 1.3 million Somalians, including 80 % of women and children, had to change the region to flee drought. If the stadium of famine has not yet been reached, 8.3 million people, more than half of the Somali population, will need humanitarian aid this year, he added.
Workneh Gebeyu, executive secretary of IGAD, called for urgent international mobilization in the face of this aggravation drought. “National governments, humanitarian and development actors must act so as not to have any regrets before it is too late,” he said.