The 'four forgotten famines' that the world never hears of

“We stand at a critical point in history. Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations,” O’Brien warned.

In a powerful speech to the UN Security Council, O’Brien explained in the clearest terms possible that without collective global efforts, people will simply starve to death. He told of how many more would die from disease and that children would be left out of school.

As communities’ resilience “rapidly wilted away", he described how livelihoods, future and hope will be lost, countless numbers displaced and forced to move in order to survive, creating even more instability cross entire regions.

In the lexicon of the international humanitarian community it has been dubbed the “four famines". In short, a brutal hunger, the combined result of drought and war, has four nations in its grip.

For the first time since anyone can remember, there is a very real possibility of four famines in Yemen, South Sudan, northeastern Nigeria and Somalia breaking out at once. Such is the severity of the crisis that it has prompted an unprecedented response from the aid community. Agencies usually raise funds on their own. But in the last few weeks, eight international aid organisations, including Mercy Corps, Oxfam, Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee have banded together to form a Global Emergency Response Coalition and Hunger Relief Fund.

The aid community is facing a daunting challenge, not just in responding on the ground, but also in getting the world to sit up and take notice in the first place. “We can’t seem to get anyone’s attention on what’s going on,” Carolyn Miles, the president and chief executive of Save the Children, told the Washington Post recently.

Others point to factors they see as providing part of the explanation for such disinterest. “Politicians around the world are very focused domestically on politics at home, not on international issues,” says Justin Forsyth, a deputy executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), whose views are echoed by other UN officials.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” admits David Beasley, a former United States governor who now heads the UN World Food Programme. “The last eight to 10 months the world has been distracted. It’s all Trump, Trump, Trump, and here we are in crisis mode.”

There are other reasons too why this famine threat is not resonating as it should, resulting in a dangerous shortfall of food supplies to stem these simultaneous crises.

Donor fatigue and the sheer magnitude of the need are suggested by some as likely reasons, while according to Justin Forsyth of UNICEF, there may be some fear among the public that their aid money hasn’t really made a difference when they’ve provided it before.

That such money does make a positive difference on the ground is something that many eye-witnesses to such crises – myself included – can vouch for, but the scale and unrelenting demands mean that whatever is provided is instantly used up.

Then of course there is the fact that many see such crises as man-made politically perpetrated and perpetuated.

While each of the four countries affected by the threat of famine do so because of conditions specific to each of them, war is a contributing factor in every one.

In Yemen, which the Famine Early Warning System Network calls “the largest food security emergency in the world", more than 400,000 children are severely malnourished.

Right now 6.8 million Yemenis are currently facing food emergency status with another 10.2 million in crisis. This dire situation has recently been compounded by the outbreak of cholera that is sweeping through the country.

For years now Yemen has been devastated by a war between forces loyal to the internationally-recognised government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi and those allied to the Houthi rebel movement.

More than any of the other three countries, Yemen demonstrates the human consequences when food access becomes a weapon of war. Nowhere is this more evident than in case of the country’s port city of Hodeidah, which has been a highly contested area by both the rebel Houthis and Saudi Arabia, who is leading the Hadi-backed coalition.

Prior to the war, 80 per cent of all imports into Yemen entered through this port. With Yemen heavily dependent on imports for most things, including 90 per cent of its food, the continuous attacks on the port by both sides have crippled the food supply system without providing any real alternative.

At Saudi insistence, backed by the US and the UK, the UN Security Council imposed a blockade on Yemen.

“While the famine deepens, the British and American navies persist in enforcing the blockade and diplomats at the Security Council discuss how they could recalibrate the embargo,” pointed out Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, in a recent hard-hitting essay in the London Review of Books. All of them, de Waal went on to add, “are in danger of becoming accessories to starvation.”

De Waal, believes that what we are witnessing right now in all of the four countries, is the return of famine as a weapon of war. He argues that while humanitarians in the short term are faced with ever-increasing demands on their knowledge, skill and resources, their longer-term strategy should also be to take the initiative in proposing that starvation – as a weapon of war – be added to the list of crimes against humanity.

De Waal’s treatise is also borne out to varying degrees in the other three countries currently under threat of famine.

The very definition of famine itself of course is based on strict criteria. On the international level, organisations use what is called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPS) to determine the level of food insecurity in a specific area.

The IPS system examines food prices, harvest yields, average income changes and household food neediness in determining which phase an area falls under. It is however generally, this last factor that most people associate with food security.

It is phase five, (catastrophe) within the IPS, which constitutes an actual famine. This means that 20 per cent of households are facing extreme food shortages, 30 per cent of the population faces acute malnourishment and there are two hunger-related deaths per 10,000 people per day.

The other two important categories are phase three (crisis) and phase four (emergency), which are the forbearers of the most extreme classification (catastrophe).

Earlier this year the UN declared that parts of former Unity State, South Sudan were officially at the catastrophic phase of famine. This impacted on over 100,000 people in Unity State. Later, although that famine classification was rolled back after humanitarian intervention, it’s still estimated that one million South Sudanese sit on the verge of the catastrophe classification level.

Once more war has played a crucial role in exacerbating the situation in South Sudan.

As Alex de Waal again points out: “The government and the rebel armies have fought much less against each other than against the civilian population.”

Fully 50 per cent of South Sudan’s population, or six million people, are expected to be “severely food insecure” in the coming weeks, an increase of 500,000 on the month of May.

Like South Sudan, northeastern Nigeria too has been engaged in years of violent conflict, in its case between the government and jihadists of Boko Haram that sees itself as the West African wing of the Islamic State (IS) group to which it pledges allegiance.

Nigeria might be the world’s 10th largest oil producer, but just as quickly as it pumps out its 2.4 million barrels of oil a day, so Boko Haram’s scorched earth tactics spew out a gigantic flotsam of displaced humanity that now stands at 2.2 million people.

Just like its equally barbaric Middle Eastern big brother IS, Boko Haram has wrought havoc and brought fear to the civilian population, and hunger for many is never far away.

As I was to witness myself during a visit to the region last year, villages in the northeast of the country that sit in the path of the war have been stripped of assets, income and food. As the army slowly reduces the areas under Boko Haram control, they are finding small towns where thousands starved to death.

“Right now I cannot go back home, my husband is dead, my house burned to the ground and there is no food, so what is left of my life is here now,” one woman called Naomi told me, when we spoke in the dusty backstreets of Pantami a neighbourhood in the town of Gombe to where she had fled from Boko Haram.

Years of war too to have impacted dramatically on food security in Somalia and pushed this long suffering country once again to the edge of the abyss.

There drought is also playing its destructive part and the failure of spring rains may push the country into famine status by next month, according to humanitarians.

One powerful lesson from the last famine in Somalia, just six years ago, was that famines are also not simply about food. They are about something even more elemental: water. Just as in Yemen with its cholera outbreak a lack of clean water and proper hygiene is setting off an outbreak of killer diseases in displaced persons camps

“We underestimated the role of water and its contribution to mortality in the last famine,” said Ann Thomas, a water, sanitation and hygiene specialist for UNICEF in a recent interview with the New York Times. “It gets overshadowed by the food.”

Yet despite these bitter lessons, already the UN’s World Food Programme, says it might have to cut off 700,000 Somalis from aid in the next few weeks if more funding does not come through.

If drought is playing its part in Somalia, then like the other three countries threatened by famine, conflict lies at the core of its crisis.

During my last visit to the country, the threat from the al-Shabab militant Islamist group that has sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda and has banned Western aid agencies was underlined by bomb attacks in the capital Mogadishu. Even now swathes of territory remain virtual no-go areas for humanitarian organisations, making any effort to prevent the onset of widespread famine very difficult.

The terrible irony is that all the needed food and water to tackle this impending catastrophe exist even within these hard-hit countries. But armed conflict that is often created by personal rivalries between a few men turns life upside down for millions, destroying markets and causing the price of necessities to rocket.

As the never-ending fiasco that is Donald Trump’s presidency sucks attention from all kinds of issues that need attention then the global response time to the "four famines" diminishes by the day and millions of lives are on the brink.

In times past famines used to attract broad interest in the West and developed world. Music and movie stars could be relied upon to front benefit concerts and relief campaigns. Those days, it seems, have passed but famine still stalks the lives of millions of our fellow human beings.

The challenge for the humanitarian community now is finding ways to galvanise and harness that same concern. And then of course there are our political leaders. Those who need to wake up to the fact that when international aid fails to feed the hungry and tackle poverty, extremists and their campaigns only stand to benefit.

“If security strategists and xenophobes think that humanitarian crises will burn themselves out at a safe distance they are mistaken,” warns Alex de Waal.

“The biggest demographic outcome of famine has always been migration. The Gulf countries are learning this lesson, as millions of Yemenis cross their borders.”

De Waal is right, and we ignore such warnings to our shame and at our peril.