Famine Early Warning and Early Action: The Cost of Delay

The 2011 Somalia famine should not have come as a surprise. Early warnings of the impending
catastrophe accumulated over the course of the preceding year, yet the humanitarian system remained
dormant. Had donors and agencies mobilized sooner, early interventions could have been undertaken to
protect livelihoods and prevent the downward spiral into destitution and starvation.
The failure to translate early warning into early action is not confined to the case of Somalia in 2011.
The same drought that triggered famine there sparked a wider emergency in the Horn of Africa for
which early warnings were similarly ignored. More generally, delay is a defining characteristic of food
emergencies over the last three decades in both the Horn and the Sahel.
The response of the humanitarian system has been to invest in early-warning systems on the
assumption that improving the accuracy and reliability of early-warning information will enable earlier
action. Yet while such systems are more sophisticated and reliable than ever before, delay persists. The
significant opportunity presented by modern systems to intervene early and prevent crises is being
wasted. The scale of this wasted opportunity cannot be understated. The 2011 Somalia famine alone killed
tens of thousands of people, most of them children. Since 1980 over half a million people have died in
drought-related food crises.
Recent failures to prevent food crises have led to a renewed focus on early warning and early action.
This is to be welcomed; however, the stark fact that decades of investment in early-warning systems have
not led to early action should caution against a myopic focus on operational and technical improvements
alone. Although these may be intuitive and straightforward to implement, they will fail to deliver unless
fundamental barriers to early action are removed.