The humanitarian impact of the ongoing El Niño affecting 60 million people by WFP, Allafrica, FEWS Net, Unicef, agencies 10:00pm 30th Dec, 2015   April 2016    Emergency Relief Coordinator Stephen O’Brien - Global Call for Support and Action: Responding to El Niño - UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs    The current El Niño is resulting in life-threatening weather extremes around the world, including Ethiopia’s worst drought in 50 years. More than 60 million people of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable have been affected by droughts, floods and other extreme weather events made more devastating by El Niño. They require our help.    The numbers are staggering. Needs are stretching to the limit the capacity of governments and their humanitarian partners to deliver. One million children in Eastern and Southern Africa alone are severely acutely malnourished. In Ethiopia, the country worst affected by El Niño, 10.2 million people require food assistance and 6.8 million people need emergency health assistance and water. Across Southern Africa, 32 million people need some form of assistance, and that figure is likely to increase. In the Asia Pacific region, around 11 million people are food insecure. In Central America and the Caribbean, more than 9.7 million people have been affected by drought conditions linked to El Niño.    El Niño’s humanitarian impact has been most devastating in countries throughout Eastern and Southern Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Eight countries have declared a national state of emergency - El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Lesotho, Malawi, the Marshall Islands, Swaziland and Zimbabwe - and many more have declared a state of emergency in particular regions. In March, the Southern African Development Community declared a regional drought disaster.    El Niño-induced weather extremes have especially affected food security and nutrition, as well as health and water, sanitation and hygiene. There are very worrying increases in acute malnutrition among children under five as well as water- and vector-borne diseases.    The lack of clean water in health facilities has reduced or altogether stopped health services and schooling in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. El Niño is also forcing thousands of people to leave arid or flooded regions, including in Ethiopia and Kenya.    The response to this El Niño event has been major. National governments, regional organizations and the United Nations and NGOs have worked hard to respond, and coordination has been working well. But resources are lacking and preventing the necessary scale-up. The gap is threatening to cut short life-saving programmes.    Overall, about US$3.6 billion is needed by governments and Humanitarian Country Teams to tackle El Niño-related needs in 13 countries. We collectively face an alarming funding gap of over $2.2 billion for the provision of food, clean water, basic medicine, and seeds to make sure farmers do not lose their next harvest. This figure is expected to grow as additional plans are concluded and new needs assessments are finalized, notably in Ethiopia and Southern Africa.    So while the collective impact of the El Niño phenomenon has created one of the world’s biggest disasters for millions of people, this crisis is receiving, sadly, relatively little attention. I am here to sound the alarm. Again.    Although the El Niño phenomenon itself is subsiding, its devastating human impact will increase in the coming weeks and months with El Niño-related food insecurity projected to peak between December 2016 and April 2017. This is an alarm, it is not alarmist. This could become even worse if a La Niña event strikes in the third or fourth quarter of this year.    Assistance efforts must be scaled up before the worst-case scenarios become a reality. We must take urgent action now to help people whose livelihoods and whose entire way of life is threatened – even their ability to survive. We are here today to make a global call for support and action. Sixty million people already require our urgent assistance.    Together we can avert the crisis from worsening. But the longer we wait, the longer and more costly our response will need to be. Inaction also risks undermining decades of investments to development. As a reminder, and to put that into perspective, the El Niño of 1997-98 killed around 21,000 people and caused damage to infrastructure worth $36 billion.    We know what needs to be done. In this crisis we are not held back by political barriers, violent attacks or major access challenges. We must respond quickly to immediate, life threatening needs, but we must also help people to become more self-reliant, and build individual and community capacity to respond to future shocks.    We are all actively working on this. In the affected countries, we work together with development partners and national authorities. But we need donors to urgently increase funding to the response and resilience efforts.    The longer we wait, the more people will suffer, the costlier the response will be and the more development gains will be lost. The challenge now is one of political will. Urgent action must be taken to assist affected communities.    http://reliefweb.int/report/world/el-ni-o-overview-impact-projected-humanitarian-needs-and-response-14-april-2016 http://reliefweb.int/disaster/dr-2015-000137-mwi    March 2016    Food security worsens further in Southern Africa due to drought reports UN Food & Agricultural Organization (FAO)    Thirty-four countries, including 27 in Africa, are currently in need of external assistance for food due to drought, flooding and civil conflicts, according to a new edition of FAO''s Crop Prospects and Food Situation report released this week.    The figure has grown from 33 last December, after the addition of Swaziland.    Drought associated with El Nino has "sharply reduced" 2016 crop production prospects in Southern Africa, while expectations for the harvest in Morocco and Algeria have been lowered due to dry conditions.    Also in areas of Central America and the Caribbean, ongoing dry conditions linked to El Nino may affect sowings of the main season crops for the third consecutive year.    Moreover, persistent conflicts in Iraq, the Syrian Arab Republic, Yemen, Somalia, and the Central African Republic have taken a heavy toll on the agricultural sector, further worsening the humanitarian crisis in those countries.    In most cases, the impact of conflict extends into neighbouring countries such as Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo that are hosting refugee populations.    In several countries already in need of external assistance for food, conditions generally worsened in the past three months, according to the report from FAO''s Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS), mainly in the Southern Africa sub-region, where food prices have reached record highs.    http://reliefweb.int/report/world/crop-prospects-and-food-situation-no-1-march-2016 http://www.fao.org/emergencies/crisis/el-nino/en/ http://www.fao.org/webcast/home/en/item/4054/icode/    17 Mar 2016    Southern Africa drought needs swift response as millions hungry - aid agencies. (Thomson Reuters Foundation)    Southern African governments and donors must respond swiftly to the regional drought emergency triggered by El Niño, aid agencies said on Thursday, with millions in the region facing hunger.    Responding to a statement on Wednesday by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) declaring a regional disaster, Oxfam, Save the Children and CARE said some 28-30 million people faced severe hunger, a figure that could rise quickly to 49 million if no action is taken.    "We are especially concerned about the impacts of the crisis on women and girls," said Emma Naylor-Ngugi of the humanitarian group CARE. "Increasingly, families are skipping meals and eating wild fruits to get by."    The agencies urged governments and donors to coordinate their responses to the drought, prompted by the powerful El Niño phenomenon, which has driven two consecutive bad harvests and the failure of life-supporting crops.    The drought has hit much of the region, including the maize belt in South Africa, the continent"s most advanced economy and the top producer of the staple grain.    "Investing in a robust response was essential months ago and it is critical now," said Alan Paul of Save the Children"s East and Southern Africa region.    Even though the powerful El Niño weather phenomenon blamed for the drought is forecast to dissipate in the coming months, its impact on people in affected countries will last far longer, the United Nations has warned.    Oxfam"s Innocent Katsande urged all Southern African governments to declare the drought a disaster, pointing to Malawi as an example of a government that had not yet done so.    "Political leadership is crucial," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Governments need to coordinate their response to the crisis, bringing together donors and agencies."    SADC"s announcement approved the creation of a regional logistics team to coordinate the immediate response, and urged member states to scale up technological development for agriculture, energy, and water, in order to mitigate the impact of climate change on the region"s poorest people.    "This current phenomenon is a strong sign of what we can expect from a climate-changed world," said Oxfam"s Daniel Sinnathamby.    "We need to meet people"s immediate needs but we must address the longer-term issues which have made men, women and children in Southern Africa chronically vulnerable."    http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2016-03-16/oxfam-save-children-and-care-call-donor-intervention-southern http://www.elninooxfam.org/    Feb 26, 2016 (Reuters)    The Southern African Development Community (SADC) said on Friday 28 million people in the region were rendered vulnerable and in urgent need of "food and non-food" relief after last year''s poor rains were followed by an El Nino-triggered drought.    That is double the 14 million people whom the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said faced hunger in late January.    "The numbers are likely to increase in view of the current El Nino," SADC said in a statement after a regional food security meeting in Johannesburg.    http://reliefweb.int/report/nigeria/west-and-central-africa-humanitarian-bulletin-february-2016 http://reliefweb.int/report/lesotho/red-cross-lack-funding-means-starving-families-across-southern-africa-will-not-get http://reliefweb.int/report/mauritania/wfp-unicef-issue-urgent-call-support-continue-vital-assistance-mauritania http://scalingupnutrition.org/news/nearly-one-million-children-malnourished-as-el-nino-drought-situation-worsens http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/16/drought-high-temperatures-el-nino-36m-people-africa-hunger http://www.who.int/hac/crises/el-nino/22january2015/en/    January 2016    Funding shortfall threatens UN efforts to counter El Niño-exacerbated drought in southern Africa. (UN News, WFP)    With 14 million people facing hunger in southern Africa as the El Niño weather pattern, the worst in over three decades, exacerbates drought, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned today that it faces critical funding challenges in scaling up food and cash-based aid.    “The number of people without enough food could rise significantly over coming months as the region moves deeper into the so-called lean season, the period before the April harvest when food and cash stocks become increasingly depleted,” WFP said in a news release. “Particularly vulnerable are smallholder farmers who account for most agricultural production.”    The cyclical El Niño pattern of devastating droughts on some regions and catastrophic floods in others that can affect tens of millions of people around the globe, is already leading to even worse drought across southern Africa, affecting this year''s crops.    With little or no rain falling in many areas and the window for the planting of cereals closing fast or already closed in some countries, the outlook is alarming.    “Driving through southern Zambia, I saw fields of crops severely stressed from lack of water and met farmers who are struggling to cope with a second season of erratic rains,” WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin said at the end of a visit to drought-prone southern Zambia.    “Zambia is one of the biggest breadbaskets in the region and what''s happening there gives serious cause for concern not only for Zambia itself but all countries in the region.”    Worst affected by last year''s poor rains are Malawi with 2.8 million people facing hunger, Madagascar with nearly 1.9 million, and Zimbabwe with 1.5 million and last year''s harvest reduced by half compared to the previous year due to massive crop failure.    In Lesotho, the Government has declared a drought emergency and some 650,000 people, a third of the population, do not have enough food. As elsewhere, water is in extremely short supply for both crops and livestock. Also causing concern are Angola, Mozambique and Swaziland.    Food prices across southern Africa have been rising due to reduced production and availability. The price of maize, the staple for most of the region, is 73 per cent higher in Malawi than the three-year average for this time of year.    “I''m particularly concerned that smallholders won''t be able to harvest enough crops to feed their own families through the year, let alone to sell what little they can in order to cover school fees and other household needs,” Ms. Cousin said.    WFP is working with Governments, regional organizations and other partners on contingency, preparedness to secure food supplies and protect people''s livelihoods.    WFP assessment analysts estimate that more than 40 million rural and 9 million urban people in the region live in geographic zones that are highly exposed to the fall-out from El Niño. South Africa, the major breadbasket of the region, has indicated that this El Niño-induced drought is the worst the country has suffered in more than half a century.    One particularly worrying symptom of southern Africa''s vulnerability to food and nutrition security is the alarming rate of chronic malnutrition. Levels of stunting among children in Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia are among the worst in the world.    This affects children''s physical growth, cognitive development, as well as their future health and productivity.    http://reliefweb.int/report/malawi/el-ni-o-set-have-devastating-impact-southern-africa-s-harvests-and-food-security http://www.unicef.org/media/media_90252.html http://www.wfp.org/news/news-release/growing-concern-about-el-ninos-impact-southern-africa-planting-window-closes http://www.who.int/hac/crises/el-nino/22january2015/en/    9 Jan. 2016 (Allafrica, agencies)    Millions of people in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean are likely to starve in the first six months of 2016, as El Niño reaches its peak and its full impact begins to show.    Humanitarian agencies have issued warnings of a major food crisis, along with water shortages and disease outbreaks.    Most of East Africa is already stressed in terms of food security, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. Parts of Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia and Sudan are already in the crisis and emergency stages on the hunger scale, with millions of people needing food assistance.    Fewsnet also reports that Ethiopia is the most affected country. The country is currently experiencing a drought that will leave millions of people in need of food aid in the first half of 2016. Already, aid agencies have issued a food security emergency alert, with areas most affected listed as Southern Afar and Northern Somali -- which are already in the emergency stage on the hunger scale.    "It''s already too late for some regions to avoid a major emergency," says Oxfam. "It will cost at least $1.4 billion to respond to the emergency in Ethiopia alone."    The drought has been made worse by the super El Niño that is sweeping across the world. Oxfam says it intends to reach at least 777,000 people to provide them with water, sanitation and food aid.    "Millions of people in places like Ethiopia, Haiti and Papua New Guinea are already feeling the effects of drought and crop failure. We urgently need to get help to these areas to make sure people have enough food and water," said Jane Cocking, Oxfam''s humanitarian director.    Other countries of high concern are South Sudan and Yemen, both of which are affected by conflict. Nigeria, Chad, Central Africa Republic, Haiti, Central America and the Southern Africa region are also on the hunger watch list in 2016.    In Sudan, the Blue Nile region and South Kordofan states are the most affected, with the food security situation said to be deteriorating. Harvests are projected to be very low, worsened by the El Niño. Food insecurity is expected to become more acute later in the year.    And then there''s Southern Africa. People in the region are expected to begin experiencing food shortages as early as February and South Africa has already declared several provinces as disaster areas due to the El Niño.    "Aid agencies are already stretched responding to the crises in Syria, South Sudan and Yemen. We cannot afford other large-scale emergencies developing elsewhere. If the world waits to respond to emerging crises in southern Africa and Latin America, we will not be able to cope," says Oxfam.    The drought in South Africa is the worst since 1982, with at least 2.7 million people facing water and food shortages. The lack of rain brought with it high temperatures in many parts of South Africa. Johannesburg and Pretoria for instance recorded their highest temperatures ever at 36ºC and 39.8ºC respectively.    Johannesburg has even started water rationing, and some reports say that time spent in the shower have been limited to just three minutes in order to save water.    The Food and Agriculture Organisation has issued an alert for southern Africa, saying that the failing crop output will impact greatly on food security.    The region''s small-scale farmers are almost entirely dependent on rain, rendering their output highly susceptible to its variations. While El Niño''s impact depends highly on location and season -- the impact of El Niño on agricultural production appears more muted in northern areas -- past strong episodes have been associated with reduced production in several countries, including South Africa, which is the largest cereal producer in the sub-region and typically exports maize to neighbouring countries.    South Africa has already declared drought status for five provinces, its main cereal producing regions, while Lesotho has issued a drought mitigation plan and Swaziland has implemented water restrictions as reservoir levels have become low.    Due to lack of rain and water, crop survival is impossible, meaning no income for the farmers. Some large-scale farmers have even had to cut down on staff in order to reduce costs. Food prices are already rising and expected to rise further in the first few months of the year, mostly as a result of importing food.    Numbers out of South Africa indicate that the cost of maize meal have risen 14 per cent and the cost of bread risen by 7 per cent. Eggs and chicken are up 15 per cent and 4 per cent respectively. FAO reports that maize meal price increase has already hit 50 per cent.    Maize is the staple crop in South Africa and the drought has cost the maize industry a total of 12 billion rand ($769 million) in lost revenue. The sugar industry has lost two billion rand ($128 million).    In Malawi, the national food security forecast for 2016 estimates that 2.9 million people will need emergency food aid before March. Fews says that up to 2.8 million people are likely to face acute food shortage in Malawi alone. Zimbabwe on the other hand will experience significantly low maize harvests, straining food security.    Other countries affected by the El Niño drought in Southern Africa include Botswana, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique. The UN Children''s Fund estimates that at least 11 million children will face starvation as a result.    The 2015/2016 El Niño cycle is believed to be much stronger than the 1997 cycle and the worst ever recorded in 50 years.    http://www.oxfam.org/en/ethiopia/el-nino-strikes-ethiopia-without-water-we-are-no-more http://www.unicef.org/media/media_86549.html http://blogs.unicef.org/east-asia-pacific/slow-moving-disasters-climate-change-el-nino/ http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/369894/icode/ http://www.fews.net/ http://www.wfp.org/stories/drought-plunge-lesotho-food-crisis http://www.unocha.org/el-nino http://www.irinnews.org/report/102271/cop21-southern-africa-s-food-crisis-from-bad-to-worse http://www.humanitarianresponse.info/en/operations/southern-africa/document/southern-africa-humanitarian-outlook-201516-special-focus-el http://reliefweb.int/report/malawi/southern-africa-alert-severe-drought-southern-africa-expected-drive-large-food http://reliefweb.int/disaster/dr-2015-000137-mwi http://reliefweb.int/report/south-africa/cop21-southern-africas-food-crisis-bad-worse http://www.ifrc.org/en/news-and-media/press-releases/general/red-cross-warns-60-million-people-at-risk-of-acute-hunger-in-sub-saharan-africa-as-el-nino-strengthens/
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