People die of famine in nation that exports food

Here in northeastern Kenya, an area so remote and neglected by the Government that people say they are “going to Kenya” when they head south, the famine has bit the hardest.

It has not rained properly for more than a year. Nothing grows on a landscape that is parched red dust, and most wells are empty. Pastoralists have lost tens of thousands of cattle and are sharing their food rations with their livestock in a desperate bid to keep them alive.

More than 30 people are officially reported to have died from this famine. The real number could be much higher. In the Wajir hospital alone, nine people have died since November.

The British aid agency Merlin found that 27 per cent of children around the town were malnourished — nearly twice the 15 per cent emergency threshold. If the rains fail again in April, aid agencies are giving warning that the death toll will spiral.

The Government has requested $150 million (£85 million) in emergency aid to help to feed 3.5 million people. Visiting Wajir yesterday, Hilary Benn, the British Secretary of State for International Development, pledged an additional £3 million, bringing Britain’s total contribution to £12.7 million. He said: “There is a fine line between a per ennial difficulty that these people face and a tipping point. We have now reached that tipping point.”

But while the drought is one of the most severe in years, questions are being asked — even at the highest levels of the United Nations — about why a country like Kenya continues to need emergency food aid.

Although less than a fifth of its land is arable, Kenya is a food exporter. Grain silos are still full from last year’s harvest. Despite the drought, the Government forecasts a surplus of 62,500 metric tonnes of maize next year.

Kenya’s media accuse the Government of failing to avert a crisis everyone saw coming. During the second half of last year, while the famine was unfolding, President Kibaki’s Cabinet did not hold a single meeting.

Ministers spent most of their time campaigning in a referendum on whether to adopt a new constitution. There were food handouts, but in many cases these were forms of patronage before the vote rather than targeted relief.

“It seems that politics have been a large distraction to the Government’s handling of the crisis,” one Western ambassador said. “And the northeast is not worth much in terms of votes.”

The Government was shocked into action after President Kibaki visited the worst-affected areas, but the response has been haphazard. The World Food Programme did not have enough funds to distribute food to all affected areas, so the Government sent in the military. In some regions food delivered by the army has simply been thrown off trucks, according to Oxfam, which yesterday described the distribution as fractured, inefficient and wasteful.

Mr Benn acknowledged that the Kenyan Government had made a “slow start” in tackling the famine, and said that Britain’s contribution was necessary to save lives. But he admitted that something had to be done to break the country’s dependency on food aid when droughts are becoming more frequent. Britain has contributed to emergency food appeals in 14 of the past 15 years. Dennis McNamara, the head of the UN body set up to co-ordinate humanitarian relief, also criticised the Kenyan Government yesterday. Kenya, he said, was relatively well-off, but poverty, land disputes and drought could lead to the same vicious conflict over land seen in Darfur. Without social protection, the poor would fall through the net, he predicted. “I have no doubt that we’ll be seeing pictures of dying babies on our screens soon.”

VICTIMS OF THE GREAT DROUGHT