Spreading hunger tests open borders in East Africa

The East African region is facing its worst famine in nearly 60 years. Up to 11 million people are affected, which has forced the United Nations to declare the first famine in the region in 25 years.

The crisis is particularly acute in war-ravaged Somalia, where an estimated 10,000 people have died for far, and another three million people need food assistance. In Kenya, 3.6 million people are starving and in Ethiopia, the number stands at 4.5 million.

While the famine and the humanitarian crisis in Somalia is starting to be described in biblical terms, in neighbouring countries, it could lead to major problems and cause conflict with, particularly, its Tanzania and Ethiopian neighbours.

Nearly 2,000 refugees — most of them mothers supporting starving babies — are crossing Kenya’s northern border daily into overwhelmed refugee camps like Dadaab, and the government is sounding the alarm over the security threat posed by the unfolding humanitarian crisis.

In all, a reported 800,000 people have streamed into overcrowded refugee camps in neighbouring countries.

Assistant Minister for Internal Security Joshua Orwa Ojode conceded that the continued inflow of Somalis seeking food is a major threat to Kenya’s security.

In the East African Community, Kenya’s is by far the worst case. The current food crisis has already resulted in disaster, when at least 20 people were killed after a group of unknown Ethiopian gunmen clashed with Kenyan pastoralists in a remote border region. Cattle rustlers from Ethiopia attacked stock breeders from Todonyang area in Turkana district and opened fire indiscriminately, according to media reports. If the food and water shortages persist, analysts say, the border clashes are likely to continue and possibly even get worse.

The crisis has come at the worst possible time for Kenya and the EAC, where the scale of the geopolitics of food is coming into perspective. While Kenya, Somalia and some parts of Ethiopia have no food, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia have a great harvest.

While Ugandan and Tanzanian security forces have clashed with and arrested Kenyan fishermen on Lake Victoria in recent years, EAC trade has largely gone on unhindered in the past five years. The fights over milk and maize exports have also become a recurring theme.

However, the perennial food bans that block countries with a surplus harvest from moving food freely to deficit areas could start threatening the prospects for deepening regional integration.

Take the case of milk. In 2008, Tanzania banned Brookside Dairy, a Kenyan firm owned by the Kenyatta family, from collecting milk from Tanzanian farmers and processing it in Kenya. Brookside withdrew from the market, and milk prices paid to farmers in northern Tanzania collapsed.

Tanzania’s ban

But probably nothing is being debated in pro-integration circles in East Africa today as tensely as Tanzania’s reaction to the Kenyan famine — Dar es Salaam has imposed a food exports ban.

“We will not allow the export of food, especially maize, between April, May and June,” Tanzania’s Agriculture Minister Jumanne Maghembe was reported as saying in the Business Daily.

Tanzania argues that it has stepped up efforts to curb smuggling of maize into Kenya as famine looms at home following poor harvests this season due to insufficient rains.

So the export bans are a case of the country looking after its national interests, and perhaps cannot be faulted. Senior officials interviewed by Daily Nation, a sister publication of The EastAfrican, said the ban would remain in force for maize and other cereals until the situation normalises, probably at the onset of the next rainy season at the end of the year or early next year.
Still the optimists say the East African integration project will overcome the present shock. Tanzania remains a major exporter of food to Kenya. Between January and June this year, for instance, 8,900 metric tonnes of cereal were traded from Tanzania into Kenya through the border towns of Loitokitok and Namanga, compared with 7,200 metric tonnes that came into Kenya from Uganda at Malaba and Lwakhakha.

Kenya, however, has been able to freely buy food from Uganda, which could tip the balance back in favour of Kampala.
The grim forecast

The current crisis has been long in the making. The Famine Early Warning System Network (Fews Net) in an analysis of the food situation in East Africa forecasting the period from May-September 2011 gives a grim prognosis of how food shortages, falling farming incomes and rising inflation could affect the poor, and possibly lead to political protests.

The analysis noted that two consecutive seasonal failures in Kenya would most likely lead to reduced local food stocks and significant increases in staple food prices as traders will need to source staples from other surplus regions (like the South Rift in Kenya or northern Tanzania) against a background of increasing transport costs.

“The very poor and poor households (who comprise about 50 per cent of the population) will intensify the use of negative coping strategies such as charcoal burning and sand harvesting in meeting household survival needs,” noted the report, “Food security conditions for poor and very poor households are expected to deteriorate to Stressed and Crisis levels beginning in July, at least through September.”

This could increase political instability in Kenya as the poor struggle to survive.

Despite the periodic clashes, which are politically motivated to protect local farmers, the EAC nations have a robust trade in food. However, the quality of the relationship varies widely between nations. For instance, while Kenya and Tanzania have fractious relations in times of drought and excess harvests, the one between Rwanda and Uganda is almost perfect. On the other hand, Kenya and Ethiopia, which are two friendly nations are unable to secure their borders to stop border conflicts inspired by food and water stress.
Eye to Kenya

The EAC will do well to keep an eye on Kenya. The country is in the midst of the most extensive political transition in peacetime of any nation in the sub-region as it tries to implement a new Constitution that promises to shake up the way the country is run. In addition, it also has to focus on preparing for a complex election next year where voters will have to choose leaders for a record 4,000-plus elective positions at national and regional government levels.

The Kenyan economy has undergone a dramatic reversal of fortunes that has seen it expand from a gross domestic product of $13 billion in 2002 to an estimated $40 billion in 2011. GDP is a measure of national output in a given year. The IMF expects Kenya’s economy to grow by 5.5 per cent in 2011.

Investor confidence in the country has buoyed up the rest of East Africa. If the famine in the north spreads and plunges the country into crisis, the constitutional and reform process could be thrown in jeopardy.

Uganda, for example, is already witnessing major increases in fuel and transport inflation that is making it harder for the ordinary citizen to put food on their table. High transport costs in Kenya, and rising global fuel and food prices affect Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and eastern DRC disproportionately.

If South Sudan is also hit, it could complicate the picture further. The EAC leaders have been saying the South Sudan Republic will be admitted quickly into the community. But if South Sudan, which formally got Independence on July 9 after a referendum in January voted in favour of secession, has to deal with famine too, it could be off to a painful start to nationhood. This might slow down its integration into the EAC as it lags behind in meeting the integration criteria as the new government focuses on feeding its people.

The Somalia situation

But perhaps more than how the famine plays out in Kenya, it’s what is happening in Somalia itself that could tip the overall outcome. The Somali militant group Al Shabaab, which is fighting the transitional government in Somalia and the African Union peacekeeping force (Amisom) has in the past two years taken a tough stance against allowing aid groups to supply relief.

This has exacerbated the suffering and deaths. At the start of the week it seemed to relent, and announced that it would allow aid agencies to supply relief.

But hours later, it recanted that position and slammed the ban back. Observers think the episode suggests that the Al Shabaab factions are split over whether or not to allow relief.

In any event, it is easy to see how this refusal advances the Shabaab’s cause. Ideally, an easy way food can be distributed to most of southern Somalia is if it is handed to the Al Shabaab to do the job. However, the terrorist organisation, which does not seek to win the hearts and minds of the people it is supposedly fighting for, would just sell the food and buy more arms.

The international community has therefore balked at this, fearing the Shabaab would use it as a strategic stockpile for its fighters.

But even if it distributed it, it would dramatically increase the militia’s power.

Equally, the refusal to distribute aid means that the pressure to feed the hungry is placed on the fragile, corrupt and divided transitional government in Somalia. Already hundreds of thousands of people have streamed into Mogadishu hoping for a lifeline. In addition to food shortages, the war-torn city has been pounded by torrential rains in the last few days, creating a nightmare for the food refugees.

Al Shabaab must be calculating that if these pressures are mounted on Mogadishu, it could collapse the government. In addition, it would present a crisis for Amisom – specifically the EAC countries of Uganda and Burundi, the only two members contributing troops to the AU peacekeeping force.

Recently, President Yoweri Museveni managed to get an international meeting on Somalia in Kampala to endorse an otherwise controversial extension of the term of the TFG. With the worst famine in a generation in the Horn, it is unlikely that the Amisom peacekeeping effort will get more resources, which it will need to function in a Mogadishu teeming with hungry people.

Faced with a collapsing currency and rising food prices back home, it is difficult to see how Uganda, for example, can response creatively. For now, everything seems to be playing in the Al Shabaab’s favour.

For Kenya, it means the double burden of its own food shortages and an increasingly restless hungry population in the towns, and the pressures of Somalis streaming into the country for relief, can only get worse.

Nairobi is likely to be more vexed if it thinks some EAC partners are not helping by locking its traders out of their food markets.

*Additional reporting by Fred Oluoch and Christine Mungai.