The Hungry Horn
Somalia and Ethiopia are hovering at the edge of famine.
The Washington Post reported on the crisis in the “hungry horn” of Africa last week. In Somalia, U.N. officials predict that half of the population, about 3.5 million people, will need food aid. The New York Times explains the hunger is driven by rampant political insecurity, spikes in global food prices, devaluation of the local currency, and a severe drought.
The World Food Program is struggling to keep up, having already doubled the amount of food it distributes in Somalia and needing an additional 369,000 metric tons of food in Ethiopa. But Doctors Without Borders, a medical aid organization, says the situation just keeps getting worse as cereal prices in the Horn in the last year surged by as much as 375 percent. To make things worse, the drought has killed of most livestock, forcing formerly self-sufficient people to wait in line for food aid.
The next rainy season isn’t due till October, and the wells and watering holes that the people and animals depend on during the dry season are already drying up. Even the camels are hard pressed to survive.
Mercy Corps' country director in Somalia says "It's a life or death situation right now." A 72-year-old herder says it's "the worst I've ever seen."
International Medical Corps, another international medical aid organization in Somalia, is predicting grave starvation risks, with a recent 400 percent rise in the number of severely malnourished young children.
And the current drought — and its problems — are probably here to stay. Researchers have discovered that global warming is drying out the Horn of Africa — and it's happening much faster than anyone anticipated.
What will happen when current drought becomes a permanent shift to desert conditions? Somalia is only the first. Ethiopia is soon to follow.
Whether it is Somalia’s food crisis, the multi-year drought in Australia, or flooding in the American bread basket, climate change is going to vastly affect the world’s food markets.
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Exporting farmland
The Wall Street Journal just reported on a new twist in the global food crisis, describing some controversial deals to export farmland in developing nations. The article cites a recent plan for Saudi Arabia to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a farming tract in Indonesia, where farmers will grow rice, sugar cane and soybeans. A portion of these crops would then be dedicated to Saudi Arabia. There are apparently a number of identical deals between many other countries.
With the threat of diminishing food supplies, these deals are angering many people who fear that their own countrymen are being shortchanged in favor of richer nations. According to the article, "the key is to ensure that foreign investments in agriculture also serve the local population." This is going to be a tricky thing to navigate and I'm interested to see how it all will pan out.
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