World leaders’ African failure

Europe must take the lead in ensuring that aid arrives to the millions of people starving in Africa’s Sahel region.

At the twin G8 and G20 summits in Canada this weekend, the world’s leaders made no mention of an acute crisis that has placed ten million people in western Africa at risk of severe malnutrition and starvation.

That threat to food supplies – caused by a severe drought across the Sahel region, particularly in Chad, Mali and Niger – has also been largely off the radar of politicians across the EU. It is now a matter of weeks, not months, before reports put images of the most desperate hunger on their television screens.

International aid is arriving – but too little and much too late. Supplies of food to half of Niger’s 7.1 million people are deeply insecure and millions of others are affected in Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, northern Nigeria and northern Cameroon.

The European Commission has engaged with this crisis: Kristalina Georgieva, the European commissioner for international co-operation, humanitarian aid and crisis response, visited Niger a month ago and the Commission allocated an additional €24 million of emergency aid. This aid, though welcome, could have come sooner – early warning indicators started to flash red last autumn and we are now entering the worst phase of the ‘hunger gap’.

At this point, only an urgent political push, at the highest level, can provide the impetus that is needed to make up for the cumulative delays.

In most of the affected countries, children under the age of five are the most vulnerable, with hundreds of thousands classified as severely malnourished. Many men have left their villages in search of employment in towns. Women are coping as best they can: in Chad, that means that some women are digging anthills to eat the grains and seeds the ants have stored.

The nomadic and semi-nomadic herders who rely totally on their animals also face desperate times – cattle are under-nourished and weak and, in northern Mali and Niger, the lower temperatures brought by the rainy season are now killing many of them.

In Niger, aid is getting through – but not enough of it. The World Food Programme’s (WFP) distributions have been delayed, not least by the slowness with which funds are being committed – the WFP cannot order food until it knows it has the money. It is possible no food will be delivered in August and the arrival of the rainy season will make delivery harder, if not impossible.

In Chad, many may face a three-month gap, to October, before aid arrives.

This is not an unforeseen crisis – the Sahel area faces chronic problems of food insecurity. And, indeed, in Chad it is the EU’s humanitarian arm, ECHO, that has been pushing international agencies and NGOs to gear up more rapidly to face the urgent and mounting challenges. Meanwhile, in Brussels and elsewhere, there are policy debates about how best to combine long-term development with urgent responses to acute crises. But the lessons are not being learnt fast enough for this and other emerging food crises.

In the long term, more genuinely new money will be needed. A year ago, at L’Aquila, the G8 promised $22 billion (€18bn) over three years for agricultural development in countries whose food supplies are most insecure, but overall almost three-quarters of the $22bn is repackaged ‘old’ money rather than new commitments. In Canada last week, the G8 said they had delivered just $6bn (€4.9bn) so far. That is not enough.

But at this point what matters most for the people of the Sahel is emergency aid. European leaders should have demanded the G20’s attention last week. But they – and also Georgieva and Commission President José Manuel Barroso, in the past a leader in EU responses to food crises – still have a chance to apply pressure for a big, international political surge to push aid through. They should call for a UN special envoy to be sent to the region. That, though, should just be the start of engaging those politicians who last week failed so dramatically to heed a crisis they knew last autumn was probable.

Kirsty Hughes is head of policy at Oxfam GB.