Famine ends in Somalia, as drought looms in West Africa

What about drought?

But as famine eases in East Africa, there are signs that a severe drought is beginning to take hold in West Africa, placing strains on a global aid system that is still struggling to recover from the Horn of Africa drought of 2011.

On Thursday, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, told reporters in Accra, Ghana that an ongoing drought in Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger is showing signs of spreading to Burkina Faso, Senegal, and northern parts of Nigeria and Cameroon.

Grain supplies are already 50 percent lower than required in Chad and Mauritania. Declining supplies have made the food that is available more expensive. In Niger, the price of millet went up 37 percent last November, compared with the same period in 2010.   

"The [drought] season will come earlier and last longer than usual. This will leave the Sahel hugely reliant on food imports, which will have to be acquired at sky-high prices on the international market,” Agence France Presse news agency quoted Mr. De Schutter as saying. “We must not wait until people are starving in order to act. The world must respond immediately to avert a full-scale food and nutrition crisis.”

What next?

A coalition of emergency aid groups, including Oxfam and Save the Children, has called for long-term solutions to drought relief, including the creation of a global aid fund that can be dipped into in times of emergency.

Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General has called food security “the challenge of our time.”

“Our success in alleviating widespread hunger," Mr. Annan said in a recent statement, "will depend, in large part, on our ability to identify the early warning signs of food crises, and respond immediately and effectively.”

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