Human Rights in Ireland is delighted to welcome back Dug Cubie. Dug is a PhD Candidate at UCC and has worked with the Irish Refugee Council and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Dug’s main research interests are in the areas of humanitarian assistance, international development and refugee protection.
The fact that the first famine of the 21st Century has occurred in the Horn of Africa appears depressingly familiar to the cycle of drought, conflict and famine of the 20th Century seen in Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and northern Kenya. There is a clear moral imperative for the international community to respond to the horrific loss of life that the current food crisis will precipitate; yet are we simply repeating the next stage of the cycle by doing so? How can this vicious cycle be broken, and how can long-term food security be created in this region of the world?
The failure of the rains for the past four years in the Horn of Africa have led to a natural disaster – drought. The resultant failure of crops, grazing for livestock and lack of food leads to a slowly building human-made disaster – starvation. Famine is declared when acute malnutrition rates among children exceed 30%, yet in southern Somalia malnutrition rates have exceeded 50% and in parts of Turkana in northern Kenya, malnutrition rates are currently 37%. It is estimated that 3.7 million people are in need of assistance in Somalia alone, including an estimated 400,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the capital Mogadishu. A total of 11.6million people across the Horn of Africa are in need of humanitarian assistance, including 3.2 million people in Kenya. The Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya, which were initially designed for 90,000 refugees, now accommodate over 400,000 refugees.
The vulnerability of a particular population to a natural hazard, such as a drought, is determined by physical, social, economic, and environmental factors or processes, as recognised in the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005 – 2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters. The Horn of Africa faces a litany of challenging circumstances: conflict, environmental degradation, climate change, and infectious diseases to name a few. It is therefore not surprising that the current humanitarian crisis is not simply an issue of providing more food for the region. Large parts of southern and central Somalia are controlled by Al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group which until recently had denied access to international aid agencies. Hundreds of thousands of people are now internally displaced within Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, while refugees are crossing the border from Somalia daily. The prices of basic commodities such as wheat, rice and sugar have doubled.
So how should the international community respond, both in terms of the immediate humanitarian crisis and the longer-term recovery process? First of all, it should be recalled that the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement express a right to humanitarian assistance for IDPs. Principle 3(2) states: “Internally displaced persons have the right to request and to receive protection and humanitarian assistance from [their national] authorities.” Principle 18 ensures that IDPs have a right to an adequate standard of living, encompassing essential food, water, shelter, clothing, and essential medical services and sanitation; while Principle 25 articulates the right of international and humanitarian agencies to offer their services to support IDPs. For those who have crossed an international border, Chapter IV of the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees provides that refugees should be accorded the same treatment as nationals regarding welfare services. Nevertheless, international law is currently based on national authorities having the primary responsibility to provide humanitarian assistance. The right of humanitarian agencies to offer their services during armed conflicts exists in positive law through the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols, but arguably a binding “right to humanitarian assistance” in disaster settings has not yet crystallised into international law.
In practical terms, the issues to be addressed relate to access to those in need of assistance, which is of particular relevance in the context of Somalia, and the operational challenges of ensuring that the extent of assistance required is provided as soon as possible. John O’Shea of GOAL has already called for UN Peacekeepers to be deployed to Somalia, although this has been rejected by both Concern and Trócaire as “counter-productive”. However, if aid agencies are denied access to southern Somalia, it is not inconceivable that calls for international intervention will be made under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. During the response to Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008, the question was raised as to how far the international community should go in challenging the right of national sovereignty when a government denies its responsibility to protect citizens faced with mass suffering and loss of life during a humanitarian catastrophe. Both the UN Secretary-General and the ILC Special Rapporteur on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters have denied the applicability of the R2P doctrine in natural disaster settings. Yet could the situation in Somalia lead to an armed humanitarian intervention? Considering the experiences of the international community with armed humanitarian interventions, the recent history of interventions in Somalia, and the involvement of Western forces in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, this may be unlikely.
The key to the international response to the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa is co-ordination. This will entail active co-ordination between the international community and the national or local authorities on the ground, including groups such as Al-Shabab. Furthermore, humanitarian agencies need to ensure a high level of inter-agency co-ordination. For their part, donor Governments will need to ensure that sufficient funding is provided to the emergency operations, as well as the longer-term recovery and rehabilitation efforts. It is notable that the Food Aid Convention is currently being renegotiated by the eight signatory members. First concluded in 1967, the Food Aid Convention (FAC) is the only international legal instrument covering the provision of food aid to developing countries. Current signatories are: Australia, Argentina, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Norway, Switzerland and the United States. Implementation of the Convention is overseen by the Food Aid Committee, based in the International Grains Council in London. Serious concerns have been raised regarding the operational and governance structures of the current Food Aid Convention. Critics highlight the out-dated model of physical food transfers from donor countries to recipient countries and a lack of utilisation of new methods of ensuring food security, such as cash transfers and increased use of micro-nutrient enriched foods and special nutritional products.
Ultimately, many of the risk factors in the region are greatly exacerbated by the on-going conflict within Somalia and the spill over effect on neighbouring countries. However, it is imperative to ensure that urgently needed humanitarian assistance is provided in a manner that promotes the longer-term stability and security of the communities in the Horn of Africa. Conflict prevention and rehabilitation is essential, but so too is the need to undertake local and regional sourcing of food for food aid and to strengthen the linkages between emergency aid and rehabilitation, recovery and developmental assistance. As the International Law Commission debates draft articles on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters, it is clear that the international community must provide a coherent response to slow-onset disasters such as droughts in Africa in the same manner as the responses to the Haiti earthquake and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.