Famine Due to Climate Change Says African Development Bank President

African Development Bank (ADB) President Donald Kaberuka of Rwanda says that the current drought and famine in Somalia is caused by climate change. Many Somalian people have travelled to Dabaab, Kenya as well as Mogadishu., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Famine due to climate change: African bank

August 2, 2011 - 10:39AM
AFP

The famine in Africa's fragile Horn of Africa region has been caused by climate change and a collective failure to end the Somali civil war, the head of the African Development Bank says.

"This was not a tsunami that took us by surprise. Mother Nature can be blamed for much of what is happening but, before food shortages become famine, there's something else that comes into play," Donald Kaberuka told AFP.

"In this case, the epicentre of the crisis is in those parts of Somalia that are not functioning," he said.

Advertisement: Story continues below The two regions in southern Somalia where the UN last month declared a famine are controlled by rebel groups, including the al-Qaeda-linked Shebab.

Shebab is "playing with lives" by barring foreign aid from reaching starving people in drought-hit Somalia, Kaberuka said.

A famine declared last month in two southern Somali regions controlled by the Shebab rebel movement has grown to huge proportions and now threatens millions in the Horn of Africa with starvation and malnutrition, Kaberuka said.

Ten million people in the Horn of Africa are now in need of food aid, two million children are malnourished and half a million people are in danger of starvation, he added.

The international community should "get in and help" parts of Somalia that do work, namely Somaliland and Puntland in the north of the country, and give logistics aid to the African Union force, AMISOM, deployed in Somalia to try to stabilise the country.

"No one is saying they should put in soldiers from abroad - Africans are capable of doing that - but they need logistics support," Kaberuka said, citing things like food rations, transportation and helicopters.

"AMISOM is under-manned, under-equipped, does not have enough logistical support. If it did, it could easily have brought stability to that part of Somalia to allow Somalis to begin to talk about the kind of government they want," Kaberuka, a former finance minister of Rwanda, told AFP.

Much of Somalia has been wracked by lawlessness and violence since long-time leader Mohammed Siad Barre was ousted in a coup in late 1991.

An intervention by foreign troops, including the United States, in 1993, ended disastrously, with two dozen Pakistani UN soldiers and 18 Americans being killed by Somali insurgents in fierce fighting in 1993.

The United States pulled out of the UN force that intervened in Somalia in the 1990s after the bodies of some of the slain US soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by cheering Somalis.

Kaberuka, who was re-elected in 2010 to a second term as the head of the African Development Bank, is in the United States to attend meetings on international development.