horn of africa

Mientras las negociaciones sobre cambio climático de Naciones Unidas continúan en Qatar a lo largo de esta semana, aquí tenéiss una muestra de los terribles efectos de algunos de los fenómenos meteorológicos extremos que tuvieron lugar en 2012 y que afectaron a personas de todo el mundo involucradas en la producción de los alimentos que comemos. 

HECHO: Junio de 2012 fue el 328º mes consecutivo en que la temperatura media mundial superó la temperatura media del siglo XX.

As UN climate talks continue in Qatar this week, here's a look at some of what made 2012 another year of extreme weather, with impacts often seen on the food we eat and the farmers who grow it around the world. 

FACT: June 2012 was the 328th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average

Last year countries in the Horn of Africa were hit by a major drought. Approximately 13 million people have been affected by the impacts of the drought, conflict, high food prices and chronic poverty. Peoples’ lives in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti have been turned upside down and many thousands are struggling to recover, pushed into desperate poverty which it will take decades to recover from. No one knows exactly how many people died but an estimate by the UK’s Department for International Development estimated the figure could be as high as 100,000 people.

Over the last few months campaigners in the UK have been contacting their Members of Parliament (MPs) asking them to show support for the Charter to End Extreme Hunger. A petition signed by 15,000 people will be handed over to the UK Prime Minister David Cameron today (Wednesday, 18 January) calling on him to endorse the Charter. This week campaigners have been tweeting their MPs asking them to raise a question to Prime Minister David Cameron in Parliament this Wednesday.

Secretly, I was rather dreading Dadaab. For weeks I’d seen the images on TV: babies so emaciated they looked like a bundle of twigs wrapped in cloth; elderly people dying, their faces shrouded in a cloud of flies. I was bracing myself, mentally preparing to try to bear the unbearable and do the best job I could.

I have always believed that having to bury a son or daughter is the most traumatic thing that can happen to a mother, a violation of the natural order of life.  But if, on top of this, your child dies because you cannot feed him, then your pain is compounded by the impotence of not being able to respond to the most basic maternal instinct: to nourish your children.  

As millions of people continue to face hunger in East Africa, here's an event that you can take part in this weekend to help raise awareness of -- and help raise life-saving cash for -- the crisis that communities in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya are facing.

I just arrived in Nairobi from the States and it’s now been more than 10 days since parts of Somalia were announced by the United Nations to have reached famine level. As aid workers, the “F” word hits us hard.

A famine? How did we get there? How did we let the situation deteriorate so that people are actually dying of hunger?