Jason Mosley Chatham House November 2012
INTRODUCTION
More than a quarter-century after the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, and following decades of investment in famine early warning (EW) systems, a slow-motion disaster unfolded in Somalia during 2011, as a food security crisis mushroomed into a full blown famine in some central and southern districts. Warnings were sounded as early as August 2010, and only grew in intensity. However, intervention – and funding – commensurate with the scale of the disaster only increased from mid-2011, when a famine had been declared in parts of southern and central Somalia.
This is precisely the scenario that EW systems were developed to avoid. A series of technical evaluations have been and are being carried out by the humanitarian and donor communities, seeking to understand the response in Somalia and how it fell short. There are doubtless technical lessons to be learned, in terms of improving the efficacy of response and shortening lead times.
However, it is significant to note that the same climatic conditions that contributed to famine in parts of Somalia also affect neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya – neither of which experienced conditions anywhere near as dire. Nor, in fact, did the climatic factors affect other parts of Somalia in the same way. The 2011 Horn of Africa emergency was described as in essence a Somali emergency, spilling over the borders into south-eastern Ethiopia and northern Kenya (in the form of refugees). In terms of the acute emergency, this seems accurate. Both Kenya and Ethiopia face perennial food security challenges, which were exacerbated by drought in 2011, but certainly the epicentre of their emergencies played out in their borderlands with Somalia.
How can this variation be accounted for? Technical factors related to humanitarian operations and logistics do vary between the three countries, although there are serious efforts to coordinate between agencies within countries and between. Nevertheless, these factors are better left to the ‘real-time evaluation’ processes carried out by the UN Interagency Standing Committee (IASC), Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) and others.
This paper is based in part on a number of interviews conducted with humanitarian community, donor and government sources in Nairobi and Addis Ababa between 22 March and 5 April 2012, as well as on desk research and further interviews with academic and policy specialists in the United Kingdom. Informants have been kept anonymous, to allow for a more frank discussion.
The paper explores how the political context has affected and – in effect – constrains or enables the humanitarian community in its response to emergencies, examining the operating environments in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. Although the Horn of Africa is often seen as a security-challenged region, for good reason, the level of insecurity varies significantly between and within countries. Moreover, the political systems – in terms of governance (and its impact on social and economic mobility and human rights) and of government capacity – in place in the three countries bear little resemblance to each other.
What the countries do share, however, is a common climatic zone – a semi-arid rangeland that stretches across northern Kenya, into Somalia and southern Ethiopia. The first section of this paper deals with some important implications of this region’s perennial climatic challenges for approaches to improving food security. The following sections deal with the political contexts in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, how these affected the response to the 2011 crisis, and the implications for future response. The final section offers recommendations.
