When Food Is Not Enough to Stop Famine
“When children are starving, the most urgent need is to feed them. It seems simple, but is it really?”
This is the question humanitarian workers confront on a daily basis at the world’s largest refugee complex, in Dadaab, Kenya. The camps here are overflowing now, with more than 400,000 people living in a space designed for 90,000. Every day, 3,000 Somalis are fleeing to Dadaab and other camps in Kenya and Ethiopia to escape the severe drought and famine in their country.”
For the most critical cases of malnutrition, the youngest children, the answer is simple. Their tiny stomachs and tiny mouths cannot cope with anything but sugar water or high-calorie pastes like PlumpyNut, a peanut-based paste for treatment of severe malnutrition. But what about everyone else? What about the families who are lucky enough to make it to Dadaab or Dollo Ado camps, to be registered as refugees and to finally receive life-saving food assistance?”
These refugees receive food — cereals, beans, vegetable oil and a corn-soya blend — that must be cooked in order to be eaten; but, most do not receive fuel to cook this food. Imagine trying to feed your own family a bowl of raw corn meal for breakfast. “Without firewood,” a Somali refugee woman in Dadaab told me last year, “100 bags of food is useless.”