Kenya Facing Major Drought, 4 Million Require Food Aid
Related subjects: Africa, East Africa, Environment & Ecology, Harvest & Food Supply, Sustainable Development, The Global Intercept, United Nations, Water: a Global Crisis Comments (1)
Tens of thousands of head of livestock are dying in Kenya, due to one of the worst recorded droughts in the east African nation’s history. The UN is requesting $230 million in aid, and says 4 million people may face hunger if food aid is not delivered. Goatherds report being unable to get their herds to water, having to leave their animals along the way and carry what small amount of water they can back to the dying animals.
In many cases, there are no animals left alive to drink. With croplands drying up and livestock dying off, Kenya’s human population is increasingly likely to face crisis-level food shortages, and severe malnutrition is already on the rise. There are concerns about political stability in the especially hard-hit southeast of the country, as people must migrate in search of work, food, and even water, in ever larger numbers.
Gabrielle Menezes, of the UN World Food Programme, says as many as 1.3 million people are not receiving the food aid they need to weather the drought. That news means that without a significant investment in ramping up aid to Kenya’s remote areas, over 1 million people could soon be facing starvation conditions.
Kenya’s situation is made still worse by the ongoing drought crisis in neighboring Uganda, where up to 2 million people are in need of food aid, and the government has banned the export of certain crops. The Ugandan coffee harvest has been severely diminished by the drought, further tightening the economic power the nation’s people can use to bring food to the table.
With crops withering across the southeast, and food for livestock ever more scarce, Kenya now faces the possibility of the collapse of the human food web across part of the country, including the economic devastation that will emerge from the mass death of livestock needed to sustain local economies. As families lose the livestock on which they depend for a living, communities may break down, and mass migration looms as a social, political and economic problem.
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Though by no means do we want to see anyone starve, I think this is an excellent example of why African nations must not be dependent on foreign aid. Something like this happens and they’re unprepared to meet demand. On the other hand, you don’t hear this kind of story from somewhere like the US or England or most of India, because their economies are well-developed (and this should be a pattern for Kenya and others to follow).
And even if the global community was able to send enough to meet the need, there’s always corruption in the government (it’s not just Kenya’s government, though you can see this link for some examples of terrible corruption in Africa. There’s corruption in every government in the world. But in a place as dependent on foreign aid as Kenya, corruption kills).