KENYA-FOOD: Famine Threatens a Million Lives, NGOs Warns

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 1 1996 (IPS) - Famine looms in north-eastern Kenya, threatening the lives of an estimated one million nomads, warn non-governmental organisations (NGOs) here.

“We must not wait until disaster strikes,” Abddullahi Adbi, chief executive officer of Northern Aid, a Kenyan NGO, told IPS Thursday. He said his organisation — which operates in the area — has urged aid agencies to rush in with food to ward off the impending catastrophe.

Abdi attributed the food shortage in north-eastern Kenya, which borders on Somalia and Ethiopia, to inadequate rainfall last year and the withdrawal of international NGOs and relief agencies that operated in the region at the height of the civil war in Somalia and the drought that devastated the Horn of Africa in 1992 and 1993.

Unable to feed themselves, thousands of the region’s nomads fled to towns like Mandera, Wajir and Garissa, so as to benefit from food provided by relief agencies for refugees from neighbouring Somalia.

Mandera, for example, had around 30,000 residents in 1992. After the clan war broke out in Somalia, its population exploded to about 100,000, according to Abdi. The Somalis have left, but the town still has about 50,000 people as a result of the influx of nomads from surrounding areas who have camped there since they have no other means of survival, he said.

“Many of these people are still in the urban areas while livestock farming and other food production activities in the countryside have been drastically reduced,” added Abdi.

To make matters worse, trade between Mandera and Somalia has declined considerably since Somalia was ravaged by civil war. In better times, the bustling cross-border trade ensured that people in the area had the capacity to purchase food and other essentials.

“Today, many of them cannot afford to,” explains Abdi.

As a result, the number of destitute in places like Mandera has risen and is still going up “although statistics are difficult to obtain,” he said.

According to the District Development Plan for Mandera (1994- 1996), the Mandera district requires 27,450 tonnes of food per year, but only produce 2,970 tonnes. In past years, the shortfall was generally covered by food relief. Now that has dried up.

Drought and famine are persistent problems in northeast Kenya, dating back to pre-colonial times and figuring prominently in the stories and songs handed down from generation to generation, according to Northern Aid’s members. What is new, they say, is the magnitude and frequency of these disasters.

“In very severe cases plants and their dependents die,” Peter Abwao, Northern Aid’s projects officer, told IPS. “In most parts of northeast Kenya, a minimum of 50 millimetres of rain per month is required in the wet season to ensure adequate growth of range plants.”

“We should not be surprised when we hear of people dying in this region as a result of famine any time from now,” warned Abwao, who has done research on the food situation in the northeast.

Already, the ethnic Somalis, Samburus, Borona and Turkana who live in the area have lost much of their livestock.

“Some have lost as many as 50 percent of their animals to the drought,” says Abdi Omer, spokesman for the Nairobi-based Kenya Pastoralist Forum.

“The hardest hit are cattle and sheep,” he explains. “Only camels, known for their ability to sustain thirst for a long time, have survived. Without camels they would have lost all their wealth.”

Omer said it was not just north-eastern Kenya that was threatened. In the Masailand, to the west, “the situation is threatening, although it is not as bad as in the northern region, ” he said.