The Great Debate

By Josette Sheeran
The opinions expressed are her own.

I will never forget holding my newborn baby in my arms watching a television report on the 1987 famine in Ethiopia – hearing the haunting cries of babies whose hunger could not be met by their anguished mothers. Tragically, today we are seeing the same images as the worst drought in 60 years again devastates the Horn of Africa, throwing as many as 12 million into desperate hunger.

But there are hopeful signs that today’s drought need not result in the tens of thousands of deaths that we saw in earlier decades. Other than the tragic situation in South Somalia, where those in control have blocked humanitarian assistance, the drought’s impact has been blunted by advance preparation and resiliency programs. WFP, with the support of many, has been scaling up for more than six months.

Through a community adaptation program called MERET, WFP has been supporting the Ethiopian government in sustainable land management and rain catchment which has vastly increased food production and mitigated the impact of the drought. In the dry Karamoja region of northern Uganda, local communities are showing more resilience than in the 2007-2009 droughts, thanks to a new system of communal food stocks that are replenished at harvest time.

We also know more today about how proper nutrition saves lives. Maternal and child undernutrition is the underlying cause of 3.5 million deaths in children under five each year, on average, one every ten seconds. The 2008 landmark Lancet series outlined that inadequate nutrition during the first 1000 days – from conception to two years old – leads to irreversible impairments in physical and cognitive development, permanently damaging the brains and bodies of a generation.

Nutrition must begin in the womb. That is why the world has correctly emphasized the first 1000 days as the way to break the intergenerational cycle of malnutrition. As Nicholas Kristof noted in a recent column, 1.4 million child deaths could be averted each year if babies were breast-fed properly. WFP encourages exclusive breast feeding for a minimum of six months and actively supports the work of WHO and UNICEF in this critical area. After complementary feeding starts, WFP provides young children and nursing mothers with supplemental nutritional foods.

By Daniela Kroslak, Deputy Africa Program Director, and Andrew Stroehlein, Communications Director, of the International Crisis Group, Any views expressed are their own.

Pirates, Islamists, refugees, anarchy, civil war — not much good news has come out of Somalia in the last couple of decades. With warlord replacing warlord over the years and transitional governments constantly hovering between extremely weak and non-existent on the ground, the temptation will be to view this week’s election of a new Somali president with an eye-rolling, “so what?”

Yet there is a chance, albeit a slim one, that this moment will mark the start of some small progress for the shattered country. That is, if the international community plays the next few months very carefully and does not let ideology trump pragmatism.

Islamist militants imposing a strict form of Islamic law are knocking on the doors of Somalia's capital, the country's president fears his government could collapse -- and now pirates have seized a super-tanker laden with crude oil heading to the United States from Saudi Arabia.

Chaos, conflict and humanitarian crises in Somalia are hardly new. It's a poor, dry nation where a million people live as refugees and 10,000 civilians have been killed in the Islamist-led insurgency of the last two years. A fledgling peace process looks fragile. Any hopes an international peacekeeping force will soon come to the rescue of a country that has become the epitome of anarchic violence are optimistic, at best.

But besides causing instability in the Horn of Africa, the turmoil onshore is spilling into the busy waters of the Gulf of Aden. The European Union and NATO have beefed up patrols of this key trade route linking Asia to Europe via the Suez Canal as more and more ships fall prey to piracy. Attacks off the coast of east Africa also threaten vital food aid deliveries to Somalia.