Humanitarian summit in Pretoria on East and Southern Africa: “Preparing for the worst”

At the initiative of the Government of Ethiopia and South Africa and the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is convening a consultation from 27 to 29 October with experts from all over the world to advise on how to better prepare for and respond to humanitarian crises in the Eastern and Southern Africa regions.

The outcome of this high-level regional meeting in Pretoria will contribute to the UN Humanitarian Summit, which will take place in Istanbul (Turkey) in 2015.

Eastern Africa is particularly vulnerable to crises and natural disasters, and the situation will likely worsen because of  climate change which is already felt in many places, particularly in rural areas.

The region has been plagued by droughts, floods, conflict, locust invasions and transboundary animal diseases which affect the lives, livelihoods and food security of already vulnerable communities, often destroying, in a short time, any development gains and leaving thousands of poor households destitute.

 The challenge today is to ensure that individuals, communities and systems are able to withstand future shocks but also to adapt   and build back better when disasters strike.

This is what resilience is about. In a region like southern Africa where many people rely on agriculture, livestock, or fisheries for their livelihood, increasing the resilience of family farmers to threats and crisis should be a priority.

 At the African Union Summit that took place in Malabo in June this year, the Heads of State expressed concern over vulnerability of African production systems to external factors such as climate change and  global economic and political shocks. They are committed to reducing livelihood vulnerabilities by:

•     strengthening early warning systems to facilitate advanced and proactive response to disasters and emergencies with food and nutrition security implications;

•     strengthening food and cash reserves to respond to food shortages brought on by periodic prolonged droughts or other disasters/emergencies;

•     building resilience of systems, mainstreaming resilience and risk management in policies, strategies and investment plans;

•     ensuring that by 2025 at least 30 percent of farming, pastoral and fisher households are resilient to climate and weather related risks; and

•     enhancing investments for resilience building initiatives including social security for rural workers and other vulnerable social groups as well as for vulnerable ecosystems.

 We in FAO applaud such a timely and appropriate political commitment of African leaders and together with our partners of the African Union and of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and regional commissions such as Intergovernmental Authority on Drought and Development (IGAD) or Southern African Development Community (SADC) we stand ready to transform this vision into concrete resilience building activities to support  climate change adaptation and to reduce the negative impact of  extreme events. This includes:

Support to regional Resilience programmes and platform such as IDDRISI (IGAD-led Drought Disaster Resilience and Sustainability Initiative) in IGAD and in particular support IGAD analytical capacity through the Resilience Analysis Unit (RAU) a partnership programme with UNICEF, UNDP, AND WFP.

Increasing resilience of Pastoralist and agro-ecosystems, for example supporting sustainable use of pastures, access to land in sustainable manner, planting trees on steep hillsides to reduce landslides or erosion risks, developing irrigation systems or incorporating biomass into crop soils to improve their capacity to absorb water and thus reduce the possibility of flooding and enhancing resistance to drought;

Increasing social resilience through social protection programmes including ones aimed at better access to food such as school feeding programmes linked to purchases from small-scale farmers, or crop insurance schemes;

Increasing economic resilience  by building inclusive agricultural markets that can support a long-term and stable increase in the value of agricultural production; supporting institutional capacity, for example, by putting in place early warning systems that lead to early actions; increasing financing to agriculture particularly family farming; and investing in rural youth.

 Decades of experience in crisis response throughout the world has taught us over and over again  that crises often reveal sustainable development and governance failures, that resilience building starts by addressing vulnerabilities and that preparedness and prevention pay off while remedial actions always have high financial and social costs which increase exponentially with time. This is as true for locust plagues, drought or floods as it is for economic crisis.

 We must apply lessons from the past, scaling up or replicating successful development solutions that have yielded concrete results, before a disaster strikes. There is no time to lose; the disasters of tomorrow are already in the making. We owe this to the future generations.

- By Laurent Thomas, Assistant Director-General,   Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) and Dr. Luca.Alinovi, FAO Representative in Kenya, Head of the Resilience Hub for East Africa