Eleven centimeters. It is the arm circumference of a five-year-old girl suffering from severe acute malnutrition. The arm of a healthy girl of the same age should measure at least 13 centimeters, but it is common for NGO professionals in the Horn of Africa to find lower values. The climate crisis, the rise in prices due to the war in Ukraine and the ravages of the covid make up a perfect storm that has left 278 million people affected by hunger on the African continent, according to the UN.
For this reason, given the concurrence of climatic, conflictive and economic factors that hinder their work, humanitarian aid organizations make an appeal to mobilize funds and manage to respond to the emergency before reaching a situation of generalized famine.
The Horn of Africa region is experiencing the most severe drought in the last 40 years, after accumulating four consecutive seasons without rain in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, the most affected countries. According to Unicef data, 10 million boys and girls face problems resulting from the drought, such as severe acute malnutrition and thirst. In total, there are more than 1.7 million children in the three countries who need urgent treatment.
But the person in charge of programs and emergencies at Unicef Spain, Blanca Carazo, assures that the worst thing about children suffering from severe acute malnutrition is all the problems associated with it. "At that point, complications start to set in, because they don't have defenses against any virus. So they become vulnerable to any small infection, which they could if they had proper nutrition," she says.
"Acute malnutrition has future effects on minors, such as chronic malnutrition, which produces a delay in growth and has a great impact on their mental and physical development," says the representative of the food security department of Action Against Hunger , Hélène Pasquier, delving into the long-term effects of the food crisis.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warns that the next rainy season, scheduled from October to December 2022, may become the fifth consecutive dry season in the area.
According to the representative of Doctors Without Borders in Somalia, Djoen Besselink, it is impossible to predict the number of deaths or displaced persons, but he believes that one of the key points to reduce it is to talk about it. "It all depends on what happens in the coming months, on the amount of aid that arrives, on the actors that can be mobilized and on how many food distributions can be made" and adds that "if there is no additional support, the future looks very difficult ".
In Somalia alone, up to 1.8 million children could suffer from malnutrition between now and June of next year if humanitarian aid is not increased, according to Unicef data. People in need of assistance in the country have gone from 5.9 million in 2021 to 7.7 million in 2022.
However, the climate crisis is only an aggravating factor on top of all the previous challenges. To explain it, Blanca Carazo points to "the three Cs": "The climate is exacerbating droughts. Conflicts such as the one in Ukraine, due to their global impact, but also internal conflicts in countries such as Somalia or Ethiopia, force families to flee their homes, prevent them from farming and make it difficult for NGOs to access the territory due to lack of security. . There is also the covid, since there are families who have been throwing away their resources for years, selling their land and their cattle”, she affirms, adding that “now this drought is coming and many things are coming together”.
The NGOs denounce that the rise in prices due to the war in Ukraine affects families, since they do not have the monetary resources to face it, but it also complicates their work as organizations. Even the price of therapeutic food - a nutrient-rich paste that is distributed to children with acute malnutrition - has increased by 16%, according to data provided by Unicef.
The sanctions imposed by the European Commission on Russia and the lack of exit routes from Ukraine have left East Africa unable to continue importing wheat from these countries, which is why it has been left without supplies.
In this sense, the director of international cooperation and humanitarian aid of Save The Children, Vicente Raimundo, is opposed to the measures imposed by Europe: "it cannot be that countries that are 100% dependent on food imports do not have access to they. Sanctions that have an effect with humanitarian consequences should not be applied ”, he sentences.
Added to all this is the fact that several European countries have proposed cutting development aid budgets to finance the response to the war in Ukraine. “There are enough resources in the world to feed 345 million severely food insecure people, but we are not doing enough. Development aid is being sent to other things", declares Vicente Raimundo, adding that "if there had not been the war in Ukraine, the extraordinary budget that could have been devoted to hunger would have been greater". That is why he considers that "the bombs Ukraine are going to kill more children outside than inside”.
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) - from which UNICEF and Save The Children drink - announced last June cuts in food supplies for operations carried out in East Africa due to distribution problems and lack of funds. "Given this panorama, humanitarian aid should increase, but the opposite is happening," Blanca Carazo denounces, adding that "aid is exhausted, because many resources have been used for Ukraine."
From Action Against Hunger, Hélène Pasquier understands that the WFP has had to cut back due to inflation, but assures that situations like this food crisis "can be predicted" and that "the window for action is now". Therefore, all organizations ask for help to be able to act quickly.
