Africa: The Most Tragic OfCorners

AFRICA

The Most Tragic of Corners

Over the last century, as economies and democracies flourished, governments have been able to respond more quickly to humanitarian catastrophes, Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, recently told PBS NewsHour.

But various manmade conflicts around the globe in recent years have halted that progress.

According to the United Nations’ food agency, the number of people at risk of starvation rose to 124 million last year – a 55 percent increase from 2015.

Over one-quarter of those people live in just four countries: Somalia, South Sudan, northeastern Nigeria and Yemen.

In Somalia, about half of the nation’s population, 6.2 million people, are in need of emergency aid for food, water and shelter. The nation has endured unprecedented drought across four consecutive rainy seasons and violent conflict that’s raged since 1991, Reuters reported.

The Somali famine of 2011 already took the lives of 260,000 – half of whom died before famine was officially declared, and because militants blocked humanitarian groups’ access to those in need. The Somali government, backed by Western powers, struggles to rein in the terror of the militant group al Shabaab in rural areas.

South Sudan, too, is on the brink of another famine. Civil war has raged since 2013, just two years after South Sudan gained independence, placing almost half of the population in a “crisis” situation, Al Jazeera reported. Four million have already fled the country, marking Africa’s worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

The African continent’s most populous nation, Nigeria, is often thought of as a success story for its vast oil reserves, but it’s also facing a troubled future. For the past nine years, the government has been in a stalemate with the Islamist group Boko Haram over control of the nation’s northeast.

The militants have isolated the region, preventing aid groups from reaching an estimated one million likely in dire straits. Fighters have even gone so far as to kill humanitarian workers trying to alleviate hunger, Reuters reported.

Of all these conflicts, however, the Fletcher School’s de Waal says the situation in Yemen is perhaps the “biggest famine crime of our generation.”

As the proxy war between Saudi and Emirati-backed government forces and Iran-backed Houthi rebels continues to kill civilians indiscriminately, the Saudi-led coalition has blockaded the ports, keeping food and medicine from reaching the country.

Some 150,000 malnourished children could soon die if they don’t receive aid, as ABC News’ Ian Pannell saw on a rare trip to the country recently.

Increased global wealth has helped alleviate hunger, but the quest for power and money around the world only fuels the vicious cycle of man-made famine, said de Waal. It’s something governments can control by withdrawing from conflicts.

But so far, with too much money to be made and power to be won, that’s not likely anytime soon.