WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran’s Prepared Remarks
at HoA Mini Summit
Saturday, September 24, 2011
As we sit here today more than 13 million people across the Horn of Africa are in
urgent need of assistance.
This crisis is about more than the famine and nutritional emergency, it is a crisis
that is multi-faceted and calls for a multi-sectoral response in which the health,
nutrition and food security, water, sanitation, protection and education sectors
all play a role. Throughout the region, Agencies are working to ensure a
coordinated response through its implementation with partners and in their
respective leadership role in selected clusters/sectors.
In Somalia, a combination of drought, conflict, and lack of humanitarian access has
left four million people suffering, in desperate need of help – and hundreds of
thousands could perish in the coming months unless humanitarian assistance is
allowed to flow freely.
We are collectively struggling to reach as many people as possible that are in
need. However, in order to overcome the current situation, we need to try to
scale-up general food distribution which is constrained by lack of access. This is
a key to preventing a worsening of the nutritional situation.
Somalis have endured two decades of civil war and two consecutive seasons of failed
rains. Now, after their livestock and crops have died they are faced with the terrible
choices left to people without food: migrate – or die.
As emphasized by the Protection cluster, Somalis would in most cases rather
remain in their country than cross into Ethiopia or Kenya if minimum security
conditions are met and humanitarian assistance is provided. Therefore, it is
crucial that conditions are created in Somalia for assistance to be delivered to all
population in need in the south central part of the country.
However, amidst the persistent violence and conflict, women and children continue to
flee to refugee camps in neighboring countries in what has become “roads of death”
as many are too weak to survive the journey. In Daadab alone over 1,000 displaced
people are arriving every day. Images of women and children in desperate need of
food have stirred the world’s collective conscience. The United Nations, NGOs and
our civil society partners have valiantly risked their own safety to reach those in need.
For its part, WFP is reaching people on the move with transit rations of high energy
biscuits even before they reach the camps, and we are assisting hundreds of
thousands of Somalis arriving in camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, focusing on the most
vulnerable women and children with live-saving nutritional products.
There has been an unprecedented global response to the crisis in the Horn of Africa.
This outpouring of support has meant that new and committed organizations have
come to assist in responding to the crisis. To maximize our coverage, particularly in
southern Somalia, we need to forge partnerships with new humanitarian actors and
work on building the capacity of more partners, which include local Somali
organizations to deliver and report on humanitarian assistance. The clusters are
already proving a valuable vehicle for pursuing this approach.
The Food Cluster is coordinating with non-traditional and new organizations to
enhance the ramping up of activities in areas where access is an issue and the scale of
the crisis is greatest. Participation in the Food Cluster over the last weeks has grown
to over 60 organizations, about half of which have or plan to initiate food assistance
programs in Somalia.
But despite the best efforts of governments, the humanitarian community, the
significant resources from a broad-base of donors, including the private sector, and
all the combined work of multi-sector partners in the food cluster, famine conditions
are spreading. And unless there is a sudden and unforeseen change in the security
environment, the coming weeks will see a worsening of the situation.
Humanitarian supply lines remain highly vulnerable to looting, attack and theft by
armed groups. With parties preventing humanitarian workers access to a population
affected by famine conditions; abduction of NGO aid workers; and rampant
lawlessness throughout Somalia, the task of reaching the most vulnerable populations
remains monumental. With a consequent deterioration of the overall security, and the
predicted arrival of the Deyr rains in October, the likelihood of increasing numbers of
cases of cholera, measles and malaria on a population already weakened by famine,
could be catastrophic.
Malnutrition increases not only the risk of contracting infectious diseases, but
also disease severity and therefore the risk of death. This, along with poor health
and immunization status in drought-affected areas, limited access to food, water,
shelter and sanitation, overcrowding in camps and the stress of displacement,
put affected populations at high risk of contracting – and subsequently dying
from – infectious diseases.
In the coming rainy season, the population, already weakened by malnutrition,
will face an increased risk both from malaria and other vector borne diseases
(e.g. rift valley fever) and communicable diseases such as diarrhoeal diseases
and typhoid.
Across the Horn of Africa region, sadly, the areas most affected by the drought
are those with the highest disease burden (diarrhoeal diseases, measles, malaria,
meningitis) and the weakest health care systems. The Health Cluster response
activities have focused on preventing and controlling communicable diseases,
including through the strengthening of early warning and response systems for
epidemic-prone diseases; providing medicines, medical supplies and technical
assistance in order to support basic health care services, including immunization
campaigns and mobile clinics in the drought-affected areas; supporting the
management of severe acute malnutrition with medical complications through
re-enforced stabilization centres in referral hospitals and therapeutic feeding
centres.
In Somalia, the response requires a rapid and massive scale up of the on-going
humanitarian operation in Central/South Somalia where there is an extremely
challenging operating environment for all programme areas. As a priority, we
need to find comprehensive solutions to be able to significantly scale up food
distribution in South Central Somalia while at the same time increasing ongoing
efforts to treat acute malnutrition. This is going to require innovative solutions
in the face of this highly complex emergency and operating environment.
450,000 children under five are acutely malnourished (combination of moderate
and severely malnourished). The Nutrition Cluster is targeting 270,000 over 6
months. This will include the Expansion of services as well as establishment of
temporary mobile/outreach services to the vulnerable populations. An
additional 52 Outpatient Therapeutic Feeding Programme/Stabilization Centres
and 104 Targeted Supplementary Feeding Programme are planned to be
established in the coming weeks. Increasing the number of NGO partners from
57 in early 2011 to 95 by mid-September 2011.
The fact is while droughts may not be preventable, famines are. In areas where the
humanitarian community has access, millions of hungry arwe being reached with lifesaving action and lasting hunger solutions are being deployed that cover the full
spectrum of food security – from supporting small holder farmers to deploying antihunger safety net programmes like school feeding – helping protect the most
vulnerable and build resiliency against crisis and shocks.
In my own agency, through a community adaptation program called MERET, the
Ethiopian government, with support by WFP has been has build a sustainable land
management and rain catchment program that has vastly increased food production
and mitigated the impact of the drought. In the dry Karamoja region of northern
Uganda, local communities are showing more resilience than in the 2007-2009
droughts, thanks to a new system of communal food stocks that are replenished at
harvest time. In Kenya, WFP is reaching over 670,000 children through school
feeding as a safety net to help build resilience of many households in arid districts in
the northeast of the country that have been drastically affected by the drought.
The world is at a crossroads. Our generation may be the first in history with the
knowledge, tools and resources to truly turn back the rising tide of hunger and
misery. We now must choose whether to invest the energy and resources necessary to
win the battle against hunger or watch as we lose another generation to the scourges
of hunger and malnutrition.
The world united, with decisive action, to save tens of thousands of lives in Libya.
Now hundreds of thousands are waiting to see what we will do.
We must turn talk into action, and actions into sustainable solutions to solve not only
today’s emergency but put in place the programs, policies and protection to better
weather the inevitable droughts of tomorrow.
Over the longer term, all partners need to work on accelerating and diversifying
longer-term developmental approaches to overcome recurrent crisis. For
example, we need to work together on a multi-sectoral approach to advance risk
reduction and resilience in the Horn of Africa. This would involve bolstering
livelihoods, enhancing early warning and preparedness and ensuring authorities
and communities are able to respond in a timely and effective way. It also
includes regional and national advocacy and partnership to enhance capacity,
establish the evidence, and to foster further political and donor commitment to
disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in the Horn.