18 January 2012 - Thousands of lives lost due to late response to food crisis in East Africa

Thousands of needless deaths occurred and millions of dollars were spent because the international community failed to take decisive action on early warnings of a hunger crisis in East Africa, according to a new report by Save the Children and Oxfam. 

The report, A Dangerous Delay, says risk aversion caused a six month delay in the large-scale aid effort. Save the Children and Oxfam have said that aid agencies and national governments were too slow to scale up their response to the crisis and that many donors wanted proof of a humanitarian catastrophe before acting to prevent one.  

Sophisticated early warning systems first forecast a likely emergency as early as August 2010 but the full-scale response was not launched until July 2011. By this time malnutrition rates in parts of the region had gone far beyond the emergency threshold. 

Save the Children and Oxfam say more funding for food emergencies should be sought and released as soon as crisis signs are clear, rather than waiting until hunger levels reach a tipping point. 

A delayed approach can no longer continue - where the world knows an emergency is coming but ignores it until confronted with TV pictures of desperately malnourished children said Save the Children New Zealand CEO Liz Gibbs. 

“The warning signs were clear and with more money when it really mattered, the suffering of thousands of children would have been avoided. All governments should sign the Charter to End Extreme Hunger to help ensure a crisis like this can never happen again," Ms Gibbs said. 

The Charter to End Extreme Hunger is a joint-agency initiative, which urges governments to fulfil their responsibilities and take concrete steps to stop catastrophic food crises from happening again. It calls for an overhaul to government responses to food crises.

Although it is impossible to calculate exactly how many people died as a result of the drought, it has been estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 lives were lost between April and August 2011 - more than half of them children under the age of five. 

Today, Somalia remains the most acute food crisis in the world, with hundreds of thousands of people still at risk.  

Click here to read the report  A Dangerous Delay.