Urgent action needed to address ‘cascading crisis’ in Africa’s Sahel region – Ban

“I call upon the world to respond. Simply put, we must do more – and do it quickly,” Mr. Ban said in an address to the Luxembourg Parliament. “Across the region, we see growing conflict and unrest, more people being displaced, rising food and fuel prices and severe drought.

“The statistics are sobering: 15 million people are directly affected. More than 200,000 children died of malnutrition last  year – and another one million are threatened right now,” he added.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the food and nutrition crisis facing  countries in West Africa’s drought-prone Sahel region has continued to deteriorate at an alarming rate this year, despite commendable early response efforts by governments and international aid agencies. The worsening food shortages and malnutrition have been compounded by conflict and insecurity.

In his remarks to the Parliament, the UN chief said events in Libya have made an already difficult security and humanitarian situation even worse.

“Many thousands returned home to the Sahel. Some were migrant workers, but others are armed fighters, criminal elements, bringing with them large quantities of light and heavy weapons and ammunition,” he noted, adding that in Mali, the Tuareg rebellion in the north has uprooted at least 200,000 people.

While neighbouring countries are assisting refugees who escape across borders, those who are internally displaced receive  little help, he stated, adding that humanitarian agencies cannot access many parts of the region.

“A multifaceted crisis demands a multifaceted response,” stated Mr. Ban, who noted at the same time that international  response plans across the region are less than 40 per cent funded. “And the crisis has yet to peak.”

UN agencies and partners last December appealed for $724 million to fund the humanitarian response to the crisis in the Sahel. Mr. Ban said that by acting decisively and with practical vision now, it will be possible to head off future crises.

“Across the board, we need to think differently. If the cascading crisis in the Sahel demonstrates anything, it is the need to dig deeper, to get at the root causes of conflict,” he said.

In an article published today  entitled "Time is running out to save young lives in the Sahel " the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) writes about the situation in Burkino Faso.The drought across the Sahel is putting up to 23 million people at risk, six million of them in Burkina Faso. In the small, landlocked country of fourteen million, that means almost half the population will feel the effects of this drought.

The drought in Burkina Faso is just starting to take its toll on the population. Families knew they would run out of food as the lack of rain destroyed their crops. Many are subsistence farmers often with no other sources of income. Most cut down to eating one meal a day several months ago. But for some, even that needs to be further reduced now, the IFRC article concludes.

From Mauritania through to Mali,Niger,and Chad and Burkino Faso children have been dieing a slow death from malnourishement and the IFRC,Oxfam,World Vision , Fao and many others have been warning the international community of this catastrophic situation. Many countries in the region including Morocco and Algeria have responded generously with aid and have taken in refugies , Mauritania has at least 9,000 refugies..

Farmers  have fled their land and it will be a difficult and lengthy process to get them back to their land. This  regional crisis has taken a long time to build up.It could still be avoidable but one wonders if the international will is there to take the necessary action to restore the situation. Mr Ban's call for aid for the Sahel is the latest of many from the aid agencies but governments are not responding in a unified way.Libya could yet descend into chaos.

The failure to anticipate the effects of the exit from Libya of armed Tuareg forces and the disappearance of high tech weaponary like rocket launchers and ground to air missiles from Gaddafi's arsenals represents a serious failure of intellegence by the Western forces and their allies.

The approaching famine is the result of a longterm failure to engage effectively in the region.The lives of millions in the Sahel region have been jeopardised and the risks ignored. As President Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz of Mauritania has said the region could now become as dangerous as Afghanistan with Al Qaeda and the others taking full advantage.At a time of global financial crisis the ability of governments to act in a concerted way has been compromised by lack of financial means.With Sudan about to go to war and Somalia all but ungovernable the regional situation  looks to become even more troubling.