Why Is America Cutting Emergency Food Aid in the Middle of a Famine?

And climate change, to which the U.S. are major contributors, is making droughts worse.

http://blog.bread.org/2011/08/why-is-america-cutting-emergency-food-aid-in-the-middle-of-a-famine-.html

Tony Hall and staff from the Alliance to End Hunger are currently in East Africa to see the devastating impact of the famine gripping the Horn of Africa. Here is his first-hand report:

Ambassador Tony Hall, executive director of the Alliance to End Hunger, on a visit to Kenya in 2006. Hall is currently traveling through the country to witness first-hand the impact of the famine in the Horn of Africa. When I first visited Ethiopia at the height of the 1984 famine, I watched as 24 people died of starvation in less than 15 minutes, right in front of my eyes. Barely five years into my career as a congressman, nothing my staff told me beforehand could have prepared me for what I saw on that trip.

Gasping at awful photographs of unspeakable human suffering is one thing; bearing firsthand witness to human suffering is another thing entirely. Glancing at a picture of a starving child in the newspaper, you can always turn away. But when you're staring into the eyes of a mother who has just lost that child, it's a completely different story. There's no looking the other way.

That's why I often describe those first Ethiopia experiences as my "converting ground" on issues of global hunger. What happened in Ethiopia changed me, and changed how an entire generation looks at hunger.

It's also why I'm currently back on the Horn of Africa, reporting on the ground from the Dadaab refugee camp in eastern Kenya, less than fifty miles from the Somali border. And I am appealing to my affluent brothers and sisters in the United Stated and around the world not to look away. We need your help.

The worst drought in 60 years has struck the continent, putting more than 12 million people at risk of serious malnutrition, starvation, and even death. According to USAID, more than 500,000 Somalis have already fled the worst areas of their country, seeking food and water across the border in neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia.

Today at the Dadaab camp I met a husband and wife and their six children who have spent the last two months walking hundreds of miles from their home in Somalia. They arrived with nothing but the clothes on their back. They've made this tremendous sacrifice for one simple reason: They want to live. Dadaab gives them that hope.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, some of America's political leaders are considering budget cuts that would make it all but impossible for us to respond to crises like these in the future. The U.S. House of Representatives already voted on a budget proposal for FY2012 cutting emergency food aid by 75 percent compared with FY2008 levels. If enacted, these cuts will decrease America's commitment to addressing global hunger from 30 percent of the current global total need to less than 15 percent.

In my former role as the U.S. ambassador to the UN World Food Program, I visited dozens of refugee camps in crisis zones all over the world, and Dadaab is the best-run camp I have ever seen. It's clear that the money that the United States has spent on this crisis so far is being used well. We have actually learned and improved since 1984, but if we pull back now all of this is at risk. Now is not the time for deep cuts to emergency food aid.

The proposed cuts ignore the low-cost of these life-saving programs; U.S. foreign aid spending is less than 1 percent of the total budget. They also ignore broad bipartisan support these programs have shared in recent decades; President George W. Bush actually increased funding for international feeding programs. Moreover, these cuts would undermine our national security; hungry people either migrate, revolt ,or die, all three of which create extreme instability. Finally, and most importantly, these cuts violate the basic moral principle that we should not harm the most vulnerable people in the world in their moment of greatest need.

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