NAIROBI

At least 20 million people in the drought-plagued Horn of Africa could need emergency aid if action is not taken immediately to combat food insecurity in the region, United Nations officials said on 26 June.

"The Horn is hit by some of the world’s most severe food crises and they are coming faster and more [furiously] because of climate change, environmental degradation, political and armed conflicts and a host of other factors," Kjell Magne Bondevik, the UN Special Humanitarian Envoy to the Horn of Africa, told a news conference in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital.

"We all now need to show the commitment to end this cycle of despair and disaster, which if not stopped could next see over 20 million people in need of assistance," he said.

Bondevik spoke at the end of two days of talks in Nairobi between the six governments of the region - Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda; the UN, donors, research organisations, the private sector and non-governmental organisations.

The governments and the UN, he said, had agreed on a road map to combat food insecurity. At least 170 projects would be scaled up, including tree planting, rehabilitating land, veterinary services for drought-stricken pastoralists; agricultural advisory services for farmers; bee-keeping; dairy development; fisheries; micro-enterprises; eco-tourism; digging wells and irrigation systems, and establishing vegetable gardens.

"Although much has been done in this regard, we must work harder to improve food security in the region; the hard work starts now," Bondevik said. "We have identified what works best and where. The biggest challenge is to scale up successes to extinguish hunger in the Horn rather than just fighting fires each time one breaks out."
He added: "If we want to change the Horn so it supports people instead of increasingly making them victims, I appeal to you all to back this campaign on behalf of those brave survivors of one of the harshest environments in the world. Otherwise this failure will only haunt us all."

According to a joint statement by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), at least 70 million people – 45 percent of the total population – in the Horn live in abject poverty and face food shortages. Four major droughts hit the region in the past six years.

The road map, they said, resulted from government-led consultations since January 2007 with the support of FAO and WFP, to scale up prioritised interventions in the six countries. The talks produced a list of "170 successful projects, an armoury of interventions that can be extended and expanded in the battle against hunger".

According to WFP and FAO, the six sets of priorities for partnerships for food security in the region had been identified as: alliances to support millions of pastoralists and agro-pastoralists; the environmental challenge; combating land degradation and desertification; the role of women as a primary force for rural transformation; livelihoods diversification and income-generating activities for the food insecure; risk management and crisis response; and institutional strengthening and community-focused capacity building.

"Breaking the cycle of hunger in the Horn of Africa requires joint efforts by all stakeholders – governments of the region, UN agencies, NGOs and donors," Paul Gulleik Larsen, the director of the Office of the WFP Executive Director, said.

"The challenge of meeting Millennium Development Goal One of cutting hunger in half is huge, but it is doable. The fact that six countries have joined this consultation shows an encouraging level of political commitment."