48 hours of blogging action against East Africa food crisis

This blogpost is part of the 48 Hours of Action against the famine in the Horn of Africa. It currently has a value of five working hours and 40 EUR of donations. Please let me know via the contact form if it influenced you to donate; I will adapt the figures.


In the 1980s, towards the end of the Cold War, Somalia was heavily dependent on food aid. After the Soviet Union stopped supporting the dictator Siad Barre, the United States saw their chance. The US and other Western countries planned to make Somalia a hub to increase their influence into the Indian Ocean; in particular, they tried to buy influence through food aid.

UK Secretary of State for Development,
Andrew Mitchell, in Dadaab refugee camp
in Kenya CC BY DFID

In consequence, the "value of foreign aid to Somalia soared to $80 per person, equivalent to half the gross domestic product," Martin Meredith observes in his book The State of Africa. "Leading loyalists [of the ruling clans] made fortunes from food aid, appropriating it then selling it on the market. A World Bank study, published in 1988, estimated that the growth of food aid was fourteen times higher than the growth of food consumption. From being a country self-sufficient in food grains, Somalia became dependent on imported food, all to the advantage of the ruling elite."

Until today, it has been difficult for common people in Somalia to access healthy, nutritious food. The country remains ruled by various clans and torn apart by civil war. What is new in the current crisis is that climate change has aggravated the situation. It means that consumption behavior and mobility preferences in industrial states are now directly related to food insecurity in developing countries.

A mother with her children
in Dadaab refugee camp
CC BY Oxfam

Our immediate humanitarian impulse should be to wire the equivalent of a night out in the pubs to the donor agency of your choice – please see the buttons – to provide food to the starving population of Somalia (plus Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda). But in the long term we have to urgently stop climate change. This year will hopefully see commitments to significantly reduce emissions at the COP17 Conference in Durban. The EU and China are progressing in emission reductions (the EU rather cautiously, China at an impressive pace), while the US has relegated climate change mitigation to the back row.

Farm animals in Somaliland died
from undernutrition -
CC BY-NC-ND Oxfam

Reduction of GHG emissions are not a luxury but a security question. With every additional day that companies and airlines are allowed to pollute the environment, we are more likely to see droughts, rising temperatures, freshwater scarcity, unpredictable rain and monsoon, a rising sea level and more. In his movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has mapped out the consequences of 100 million climate refugees. The EU is already overburdened with 25,000 migrants.

It is time that the highest polluters per capita (2008) such as Qatar, Trinidad & Tobago and the United Arab Emirates, but also the US, Canada, Australia and several EU countries, realize the urgent necessity of fighting climate change. Otherwise, climate refugees may come and occupy their farmlands.

Update 08/08/2011: See the Guardian's take here: Is climate change to blame for famine in the Horn of Africa?

This blogpost is part of the 48 Hours of Action against the famine in the Horn of Africa. It currently has a value of five working hours and 40 EUR of donations. Please let me know via the contact form if it influenced you to donate; I will adapt the figures.

I throw away, you don't eat

Between yesterday and today, 219,000 people joined the dinner tables all around the world. Tomorrow, another 219,000 new world citizens will join us on this planet and another 219,000 the day after. They are born into a world that cannot feed them any more and that asks for higher and higher entry fees.

Until 2050, demand for food is expected to rise by 70%, says Oxfam in a new report published today. And within 20 years, global food prices could double as a result of climate change. The consequences look like this:



The EU has realized that it needs to act. At a food security conference organized by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) last week, Agriculture Commissioner Ciolos and Development Commissioner Piebalgs highlighted the responsibility that the EU has for food security in developing countries. The message is clear: agriculture in the global South has to become more efficient, more productive, more rewarding for the individual farmer and better governed through international, national, regional and local institutions. Sounds like an affair to be left to paper-producing bureaucrats.

But the help that the global North can give is not only about "capacity-building", it's not only about "technical support" from government to government. It starts with things as easy as reducing food waste. According to a recent study by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, a third of all products we buy are thrown away. But of course, demand for them drives prices up in the first place. Unless you are a trader of agricultural commodities, that should worry you.

Now, do I really need a luxury buffet for my XXth birthday that allows my guests a choice between 50 different kinds of food? Or could I cut it down to 15? And if there are leftovers, couldn't I put them in doggy bags and give them to a shelter?
And do I really need to throw away that two-day old cauliflower because I am leaving on a two-week vacation? Or could I put it in the freezer? There are a range of websites that offer advice on nutrition and consumer behavior, for example this one, this one, this one and a lot of others.

We all make choices every day - since we live in a global market, our consumer choices impact directly on others. Ask Spain if you don't believe me.

Shouldn't we be more responsible consumers?

As a courtesy, please don't +1 my blogposts.

A swimming pool for a kilo of beef

The Environment Committee in the European Parliament today established clearer rules for food labeling. Most importantly, on most meat products like pork or chicken, the place of origin must be indicated, including the place where the animal was born and the place where it was slaughtered. Furthermore, energy content, amounts of fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, sugars, protein and salt must be shown on the label as well. If the Council gives its ok, the EP Plenary can adopt the regulation in July 2011 (update: done).

You may remember that in June last year, the center-right in the EP strictly opposed a “traffic light system” on food items that would have meant that unhealthy products would have carried a red light and healthy products a green light (rapporteur then and now was Renate Sommer, EPP). The new regulation-to-be is certainly a good thing with regard to information, provided that it will apply to imports just as it applies to EU products. But I am still missing information on products, namely water and carbon footprint.

I would like to know that by choosing to consume a kilogram of beef, I am consuming 100,000 liters (equivalent to a 10m x 10m x 1m swimming pool) of virtual water. And when I choose to eat pork, I want to be aware that it requires around 8.8 kg of CO2 emissions/kg, transportation not counted. As a consumer, I want to have the possibility of making an informed choice, even though I admit that some consumers would probably be overburdened and confused with so much information.

But my hope is that one of the most important areas of our daily life, namely food quality, could be put under the same kind of political control as the public sector. In the past, enterprises in Europe have repeatedly broken food safety regulations to make a profit, and demanding a transparent production process would force more cheating enterprises out of business.

Calculating environmental data will undoubtedly be expensive for an enterprise*. Yet, it doesn’t appear so difficult for a food chain to conduct worldwide price analyses and to conclude sourcing agreements without taking externalities into consideration. Including water and carbon cost into the analysis only takes it a step further. And maybe, some enterprises would reconsider their sourcing decisions when they are put into the bright light of popular scrutiny.

But for all that, we first need to elect a more radical kind of European Parliament.


*Have a look here (p.15) how Arjen Hoekstra calculated the water footprint.


Update (20/04/2011): Between "set-back" and "right decision" - read here what MEPs say about the package that they adopted. 
Update (12/07/2011): It appears that there is some cautious movement on water footprint and carbon footprint labeling.