Many natural disasters that involve calamities such as droughts, floods and earth quakes result in internationally supported recovery assistance. This is particularily true when the national efforts are unable to cope with the situation. Recovery activities that focus on food security, such as those currently found in Ethiopia, are mostly oriented and limited towards seed and tool distribution, potentially also topped up with some food assistance (The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies). While such support may be appropriate and can serve to support immidiate needs and short term recovery, it rarely addresses the root causes to the crisis. It is often only a matter of time until the same population face another crisis of similar nature.

It is imperative to understand the root causes to a crisis in order to provide appropriate support. And with the modern age of access to more and better information, emergency response operations have never been better equipped to target the real, identified root causes to a crisis and thus contribute to long-term, resilience building (World Disasters Report 2010). It is also vital for post-disaster responses to strengthen and support the survivors' own organizations.
However, reality looks different. The big donor’s funding is rarely sufficient in neither amount nor flexibility. Humanitarian emergency operations are often limited to immediate needs - they rarely stretch beyond a year - and they are unable to address the many drivers that are behind a particular crisis. As an example, in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after the 2004 tsunami, with international aid under pressure to spend and to build, many buildings were put up, but when construction was finished and aid agencies withdrew, communities were left with no source of income, no social cohesion and little support for the future.  

If adequate time is spent to analyse and understand the root causes to e.g. a lack of food, in particular when it is related to droughts and climate change, improved land, water and nutrient management can be addressed. Water availability is key for a stable production and in turn also a prerequisite to encourage further investments in the production. But that requires farming systems that are water efficient, productive and resilient. To reduce the risk in farming is key to sucess.

Looking into the future, the funding time-frames to humanitarian emergencies must be extended. That will allow for a proper analysis of the root causes of a crisis and to take a broader, long-term problem solving approach to the crisis, as opposed to today’s short-term, sectorial and segmented response (Department of Cooperative Governance, RSA; UNICEF). There is also a need to coordinate inbetween the different donor organisations – there were at lest some 45 different organisations providing emergency assitance to the Horn of Africa crisis last year, many focusing on water-related support (The Nightly News, 26 September 2011). It is highly questionable if this is the most appropriate approach to address a complex, partly drought-driven crisis.

by Dr Patrick Fox

References:

• IFRC
• World Disasters Report 2010
• The Nightly News
• Department of Cooperative Governance, Republic of South Africa
• UNICEF

The Horn of Africa 2011 drought disaster - labeled by many agencies, as one of the most serious drought disasters in modern time - continues to unfold. Yet now, the appearance of the disaster has changed. With the recent rains that commenced early December ago, the drought has ended, but the crisis prevails. In some regions, notably in Kenya, the rains are furthermore the worst that some communities have experienced in 20 years.

While the scale of the drought could not be known, it was predicted more than a year earlier, October 2010, with first and foremost the anticipated impact from the La Nina. So while enough time was given to alert the response mechanisms put in place, the information spurred limited action with a traditional emergency scenario emerging as a consequence.
   
As the immediate effects of the drought have now come to an end, its full impact is yet to be calculated. It is meanwhile remarkable that relevant to the scale and depth of the drought, mortality levels were kept very modest. Yet, hundreds of thousands of people people have had to live well below subsistence levels, with severe levels of acute malnutrition as evidence of the severity of the situation. It is further known that large numbers in livestock have perished, in some areas more than fifty percent, and crops have failed across large areas, resulting in that it will take at least six months of support for agriculturalists to return to pre-disaster levels, and multiple years for pastoralists to achieve the same (IFRC, 2011).

It is hoped that the aftermath of the disaster will amongst other generate much discussion on:

1. that scale of disasers is not mesured in levels of morbidity but quality of living
2. Early Warning messages is better made use of
3. climate change adaptation is a continued part of the agricultural dialogue to secure livelihoods and
4. the approach to rural and agricultural development is aligned with sustainability and endurance of livelihood systems as a means to protect and save lives.

The latter in light of the last decades where attention has shifted away from agriculture among various large actors. For instance, The World Bank lent 26 and 10 percent respectively during the 1980's and 2000 to agriculture from its total budget (Millstone and Lang, 2003).