By Daniel Maxwell, Nisar Majid
A few 250,000 humans died within the southern Somalia famine of 2011-12, which additionally displaced and destroyed the livelihoods of thousands extra. but this difficulty were envisioned approximately a 12 months previous. The most harsh drought in Somalia's contemporary historical past coincided with an international spike in nutrients costs, hitting this arid, import-dependent state tough. The rules of Al-Shabaab, a militant Islamist team that managed southern Somalia, exacerbated an already tricky state of affairs, barring such a lot humanitarian tips, whereas the donor's counter-terrorism rules criminalized any relief falling into their fingers. an incredible catastrophe resulted from the creation and marketplace disasters brought on by means of the drought and nutrients expense drawback, whereas the famine itself used to be the results of the failure to quick reply to those occasions -- and was once therefore mostly human-made. This publication analyses the famine: the trade-offs among competing coverage priorities that ended in it, the collective failure in reaction, and the way these suffering from it tried to guard themselves and their livelihoods. It additionally examines the humanitarian reaction, together with actors that had now not formerly been quite seen in Somalia-- from Turkey, the center East, and Islamic charities worldwide.
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Extra info for Famine in Somalia: Competing Imperatives, Collective Failures, 2011-12
Example text
Chapter 9 picks up the story line in 2012, in the aftermath of the famine. A new government was formed in Somalia in 2012, with much greater international legitimacy and a different focus domestically. The chapter briefly sketches Somali politics in the aftermath of the famine, the new government, and the declining reach of Al-Shabaab. It also reviews the pivot of the international community to the “resilience” agenda and offers a critical analysis of the policy discourse around resilience—what it means and how it plays out—and considers the way in which the lessons learned from the famine inform the current policy discourse and programmatic action around resilience (or not).
Some half a million children were malnourished, nearly 200,000 of whom were severely malnourished; the proportion of malnourished children in some areas of South Central Somalia was over half the entire population of those aged under five. 1 Hundreds of thousands were displaced by the crisis, both internally and as refugees in Kenya and Ethiopia. There had been many warnings about a food security crisis of major proportions in the Greater Horn of Africa—and specific warnings about Somalia—for nearly a year before the famine was actually declared.
But drought (and climatic factors more generally) was only one of several causes. The drought coincided with a global spike in the price of basic food grains that was independent of the local production shock in the Horn of Africa. Somalia imports most of its food even in relatively productive years—through both commercial imports and humanitarian food aid. The increasing global prices for food led to a reduction in the amount Somalia imported and, together with other market factors, this drastically increased the price of food at exactly the time when the value of what people had to sell declined.