Print 
PDFFrom Foreign Policy:
Early in February, without much fanfare, the United Nations officially declared the famine over in the Horn of Africa. This is welcome news. Last summer, when the worst drought in 60 years was wasting the region, 13 million people faced starvation. The misery was most acute in Somalia, where al-Shabab, the fanatical Islamist militia with links to al Qaeda, had blocked aid groups from working in the areas under its control. In the end, an estimated 35,000 Somalis — along with some Kenyans and Ethiopians — are thought to have died; most were children under five. The handling of the calamity nonetheless has been rated an overall success. Context helps in measuring such victories. Twenty years ago, a quarter of a million Somalis perished during a similar wartime drought. And before that, in the Sahelian emergencies of the mid-1980s, a million emaciated bodies were spooned prematurely into sandy graves.
…
The United Nations expects hunger to return again this year to the Horn of Africa. The next dry season begins in May. From that month on, it simply becomes a waiting game.
Aid workers employ a highly mathematical definition for the word “famine”: It means that at least 20 percent of families in a region face extreme food shortages and acute malnutrition affects more than 30 percent of the population; there must be two starvation-related deaths per 10,000 people every day. Richard Leakey says these numbers toll, like a distant bell, for all of us. For a certain Dr. Francis Kuria of the Inter-Religious Council of Kenya, who published a well-reasoned column in the Daily Nation of Nairobi that quoted both the Roman poet Virgil and his country’s bleak ranking on the Human Development Index, they ring the end, at last, for a venerable way of life and a 10,000-year-old economy. Of the nomads he wrote: “It’s time for the Turkana to leave their wastelands and settle down.” The optimists are few. Mostly, they are the desert wanderers themselves.
(22)