A world in hunger: east Africa and beyond

The severe drought across much of east Africa is a human emergency that requires urgent attention. It also signals a global crisis: the convergence of inequality, food insecurity and climate change.


A drought across much of east Africa in mid-2011 is causing intense distress among vulnerable populations, many of them already pressed by poverty and insecurity. The range of the affected areas is extensive: the two districts in Somalia that are now designated as famine-zones are but the most extreme parts of a much wider disaster that stretches from Somalia across Ethiopia into northern Kenya, and as far west as Sudan and even the Karamoja district in northeast Uganda.

The numbers put at risk in this, the worst drought in the region since the 1950s, are enormous. At least 11 million people are touched by the disaster. In the Turkana district of northern Kenya, 385,000 children (among a total population of about 850,000) are suffering from acute malnutrition (see Miriam Gathigah, “East Africa: Millions Stare Death in the Face Amidst Ravaging Drought”, TerraViva / IPS, 18 July 2011). In Somalia, the conflict between the Islamist Shabaab movement and the nominal government makes conditions even more perilous for those affected.

The world's largest refugee camp, at Dadaab in northern Kenya, offers a stark illustration of the consequences of the drought. The population of Dadaab, which was designed to cope with 90,000 people, has increased in recent months to 380,000 - and 1,300 more are arriving daily (see Denis Foynes, “Eleven Million at Risk in Horn of Africa”, TerraViva / IPS, 19 July 2011).

The lessons of crisis

But just as striking is that this is part of a recurring phenomenon. Major warning-signs of malnutrition and famine were already visible in April 2008; among them were climatic factors, steep oil-price increases, increased demand for meat diets by richer communities, and the diversion of land to grow biofuel crops (see “The world’s food insecurity”, 24 April 2008).
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Location: Cayman Islands

Europe Headed for Water Crisis

LUCERNE, Switzerland, Jul 22, 2011 (IPS) - Future glacier retreat in the Alps could affect the hydrology of large streams more strongly than previously assumed, a new study shows. Water shortages in summer could become more frequent.


Even though their ice is called 'eternal', many alpine glaciers' lives may come to an end within this century. For 150 years, most of them have been more or less constantly retreating, and since the eighties, their shrinkage has visibly increased.

The Furka Pass in central Switzerland has long been awaiting its visitors with a special attraction. Just below the highest point of the pass, tourists may enter an ice grotto dug into the Rhone glacier to discover glacier life from the inside. Each year however, the grotto's entry can be found a few metres further downhill. Long-term measurements reveal that from 1879 to 2010, the Rhone glacier has lost 1266 metres of its original length.

The Swiss Alps are often called 'Europe's water tower'. Nearly 60 billion cubic metres of water are stored in its glaciers. Matthias Huss, glaciologist and senior lecturer at the Department of Geosciences at the University of Fribourg explains that glaciers fulfil a balancing function: "They release water exactly when we need it, while storing it in periods when we need it less." More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Villagers adopt rainwater harvesting to access safe water

PATNA: As many as 5,000 rural households in Bihar's Khagaria district have adopted rainwater harvesting as an approach to access safe water during the on-going monsoon.


These communities are mostly from the flood prone areas (largely relief oriented) and have invested their own resources to access safe water.

Villagers residing in remote villages located in Chautham, Gogari Alauli blocks of Khagaria district have adopted rainwater harvesting, said Prem K Verma who is engaged in the campaign of rainwater harvesting in the district.

Pre-2005, this decentralized system to access safe water during monsoon/floods never existed in flood plains of north Bihar. This is an outcome of past six years of efforts made by an NGO "Megh Pyne Abhiyan" (MPA) (Cloud Water Campaign) in partnership with Samta, local voluntary organization in Khagaria to develop and promote alternative drinking water and sanitation systems for the entire year in the floods plains of north Bihar.
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Location: Cayman Islands

Growing Water Deficit Threatening Grain Harvests

Many countries are facing dangerous water shortages. As world demand for food has soared, millions of farmers have drilled too many irrigation wells in efforts to expand their harvests.


As a result, water tables are falling and wells are going dry in some 20 countries containing half the world’s people. The overpumping of aquifers for irrigation temporarily inflates food production, creating a food production bubble that bursts when the aquifer is depleted.

The shrinkage of irrigation water supplies in the big three grain-producing countries—the United States, India, and China—is of particular concern. Thus far, these countries have managed to avoid falling harvests at the national level, but continued overexploitation of aquifers could soon catch up with them.

In most of the leading U.S. irrigation states, the irrigated area has peaked and begun to decline. In California, historically the irrigation leader, a combination of aquifer depletion and the diversion of irrigation water to fast-growing cities has reduced irrigated area from nearly 9 million acres in 1997 to an estimated 7.5 million acres in 2010. (One acre equals 0.4 hectares.) In Texas, the irrigated area peaked in 1978 at 7 million acres, falling to some 5 million acres as the Ogallala aquifer underlying much of the Texas panhandle was depleted.

Other states with shrinking irrigated area include Arizona, Colorado, and Florida. All three states are suffering from both aquifer depletion and the diversion of irrigation water to urban centers. And now that the states that were rapidly expanding their irrigated area, such as Nebraska and Arkansas, are starting to level off, the prospects for any national growth in irrigated area have faded. With water tables falling as aquifers are depleted under the Great Plains and California’s Central Valley, and with fast-growing cities in the Southwest taking more and more irrigation water, the U.S. irrigated area has likely peaked.

India is facing a much more difficult situation. A World Bank study reported in 2005 that the grain supply for 175 million Indians was produced by overpumping water. Water tables are falling in several states, including Punjab and Haryana, two surplus grain producers that supply most of the wheat and much of the rice used in India’s massive food distribution program for low-income consumers. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Water Experts Warn of Conflict Over Mekong Dams

The race for hydropower development among Mekong countries could lead to conflicts or even war over water, regional security experts say. 

Hydroelectric projects have begun to spring up across the Mekong River, with some already under way and other already creating tensions between Southeast Asian neighbors.

Experts on water security met in Siem Reap on Friday at a two-day conference of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific in an effort to address upcoming issues surrounding such projects and other water conflict.

“Some water-related conflicts will take place because some farmers or people who used to be living alongside the Mekong River basin, because of the dam construction, they need to be resettled, which means that there are refugees because of the dam construction, and then it will give some kinds of social impacts on particularly poor people and the marginalized,” Seungho Lee, a water expert from Korea University, based in Seoul, said on the sidelines of the conference Friday.

Government officials and experts from across the globe attended the meeting, including experts from the US, China, Japan and Southeast Asia. China already has four hydrodams in operation and four more under construction along the Mekong. At least 12 dams are planned in the lower Mekong regions of Laos and Cambodia. More >>>

Egypt’s Pope Shenouda in Nile water talks

CAIRO: Egypt’s Coptic Pontiff, Pope Shenouda II, met on Monday with the Egyptian ambassador to Ethiopia for talks over the ongoing battle for water in the Nile Basin region. 

The two discussed the current developments along the Nile and the role Egypt can play in ending the ongoing stalemate and tension over a water-sharing agreement with upstream countries. It comes as Ethiopia announced continued plans to erect a massive dam along the Nile, which Cairo sees as a threat to its water security. 
The Coptic Church reportedly told Egyptian daily al-Youm al-Saba’a that it could help solve the impasse through its connections with the Ethiopian church. The source also said that “Egyptians are in the Pope’s heart and mind and that he is concerned with this issue especially that Egypt needs stability in the coming period, and the reduction of its shared water will affect its people whether they are Christians or Muslims.” 


The meeting comes as tension builds along the Nile, with the planned dam and South Sudan’s independence, which many fear could spark a regional conflict over water resources. According to local newspapers, the Pope talked about the role of the Egyptian church in intervening in negotiations and re-establishing relations with the Ethiopian church to confirm Ethiopia’s commitment to the water agreement. More >>>

Yemen’s Dangerous Hunger Crisis

The embattled nation is struggling to find food and water while the world focuses on ending President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s violent campaign to keep power.


In one of the cities at the center of Yemen’s revolution, tanks and soldiers of President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s loyalist forces occupy the main hospital, turning away the civilian sick and wounded, and using the hospital as a vantage point to shell residential neighborhoods at night.

Prices of water as well as food have soared amid Yemen’s political crisis, so that ever more poor families are resorting to drinking water from rain and other contaminated sources, and new reports of cholera outbreaks are reaching the capital, Sana’a. Yemeni cities are emptying of day laborers and other poor, aid officials and residents told me, as men return with their families to their villages in hopes of escaping hunger.

Months of violent political crisis are depleting the savings and stockpiles of more and more Yemenis, so that not only beggars, but neighbors, come round to quietly ask for food.

“There’s no work, no water, no electricity, no security. When we sleep, my family and I are not sure if we will live until morning, because of the shelling on the houses, and the bullets all night,” says Ali Qassim Abdullah, a 44-year-old father of three young children. Abdullah spoke in Yemen’s southern city of Taiz, where loyalist units commanded by the son of Yemen’s president are accused of nightly—and sometimes random—artillery fire.
“The whole world is watching this happen to us in Taiz. And no one speaks or objects,” Abdullah told a Yemeni reporter in Taiz who helped me talk to civilians. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands