On 20 July the United Nations declared that the situations in two regions of Somalia, southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle, are to be recognised as famine, and called for a concerted and rapid humanitarian response. While the carbon tax and the travails of Rupert Murdoch have been grabbing headlines, a humanitarian emergency of potentially disastrous proportions has been taking its toll.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, there are now 11.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance across the Horn of Africa, and almost half the population of Somalia — around 3.7 million people — is in 'crisis'. More than 166,000 Somalis have fled into neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya.
According to UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-Moon, to prevent this situation transforming into a nation-wide famine, about $300 million will be required in emergency aid over the next two months.
Equipped with these figures and the occasional pictures that flicker across television screens, it can be hard to really understand what famine is: why does it arise and what do people endure under famine conditions? And why is it so important that a situation is named officially as famine?
Famines are — bluntly — manifestations of intense starvation leading to substantial mortality. According to the UN definition, famine is characterised by people eating significantly less than 2100 kilocalories of food per day, instances of wasting in more than 30 per cent of children and two deaths per 10,000 people every day.
If one were to believe the news cycle, this crisis in Somalia would seem to have arisen without warning. But it is in fact the product of a pattern which has revisited Eastern Africa throughout the last century; a pattern of unstable food supply, drought, crop failure and endemic undernutrition. It is part of a pattern we have had plenty of opportunity to observe and recognise.
In fact, Eastern Africa is historically well acquainted with famine, with the first recording of famine in the region dating back to the ninth century in Ethiopia. And in the 20th century, successive famines occurred in Ethiopia and the Ogaden region during the 1970s–1980s when around 1.5 million lives were lost as a direct result of war and starvation.
Famines in this region have generally