Somalis tend to their maize garden as a soldier keeps watch over them. Photo/FILE
By DANIEL K. KALINAKI The EastAfrican
In Summary
- Food has always been political. Peaceful and democratic countries rarely suffer famine. In Somalia, however, food is one of the tools that have been used over more than two decades of instability.
- Making Somali farmers self-sufficient is key to keeping famine at bay and skirting around the politics of humanitarian relief food.
On a hot morning in early March, a dozen or so
Somali farmers crowd into a small shelter at the UN base next to
Mogadishu Airport.
Flanked by officials from the World Food Programme
(WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), they listen
quietly through the speeches and the translator, as the sweltering sun
battles through the awning above.
The farmers are in Mogadishu to celebrate. After
two decades of war, the attendant breakdown in law and order, and
persistent drought, they have, for the first time ever, grown and sold
maize to WFP.
“Farmers are now producing the food that the poor
in Somalia are consuming,” says Luca Alinovi, the FAO officer in charge
of the country. “It is a dream come true.”
Some of the maize is lined up in 50kg bags along a
prefabricated building in the complex; after the speeches the farmers
and the officials stand before the maize for the perfunctory photo-op.
Food has always been political. Peaceful and
democratic countries rarely suffer famine. In Somalia, however, food is
one of the tools that have been used over more than two decades of
instability.
General Farah Aideed, one of the warlords that
emerged after the fall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991, confiscated
food aid and used it as a tool to rent support and punish rival
supporters.
Keeping famine away
A more recent report by the UN found that about
250,000 Somalis, half of them children aged five and below, had died in
the 18 months between September 2010 and April 2012 when drought and
famine pillaged the country.
This represented 40,000 more deaths than in the Aideed-driven famine in Somalia in 1992.
The deaths, according to the report, were caused
by the “combined impact of drought, reduced humanitarian assistance,
high food prices and civil strife in the affected regions, and the
downstream consequences of the above factors (such as disease
epidemics), all in a context of persisting and/or worsening insecurity.”
According to Somali watchers, the international
community was slow to respond to that crisis, because Al Shabaab, the
militant group that controls large swathes of the country, targeted and
hijacked relief food convoys.
In a paper published by the British think-tank
Chatham House, Rob Bailey argued that the failure to deliver food aid to
those in need during that crisis was “an obvious and inevitable
consequence of donor anti-terror strategies designed to prevent the
capture of humanitarian aid by the Islamist organisation Al Shabaab, the
de facto administration in the famine-affected areas.”
Making Somali farmers self-sufficient is,
therefore, key to keeping famine at bay and skirting around the politics
of humanitarian relief food
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