Addressing Chronic Food Insecurity in the Horn of Africa: Good Practice Identified but Commitment Needed?

The Horn of Africa has experienced recurrent crises of hunger in recent decades, which
have required massive relief operations. The region is also confronted with high endemic or
seasonal levels of food insecurity. In the regional crisis of 2008, 18 million people were
declared in need of emergency assistance. This coincided with a global rise in basic food
prices, and local price rises which may have been linked.
After decades when food insecurity was addressed through relief operations, it has more
recently become an important development issue in the eyes of donors and governments.
This paper reviews the way in which donor responses to hunger are diversifying and
demonstrating innovation, with particular focus on responses to the crisis of 2008. It
discusses in turn the context, the new approaches, obstacles to wider adoption of those
approaches and ways forward.
Important elements of context are the overall increasing levels of Official Development
Assistance to the countries of the Horn, emerging new leadership and co-ordination roles for national governments and regional organizations, and the increasing importance of climate
change, as an explicit element in donor funding decisions and in planning processes.
Promising new approaches to addressing food insecurity have been used, and valuable
lessons have been learnt, but in each case there are limitations to the approach itself, and/or
the willingness of donors to fully fund and use it.
In Ethiopia the Productive Safety Net Programme has shown great achievements in
supporting the food insecure, and in making that support less dependent on annual appeals.
But this is not to say that it is fully replacing humanitarian assistance. There are questions
also about the administrative and financial resources it requires from different stakeholders,
the extent to which it is encouraging “graduation” to food security among its clientele, and its
resilience to price volatility.
Individual donors are successfully implementing Disaster Risk Reduction approaches and
other approaches, usually country-specific, to bridging the gap between relief and
development. Governments in the region have also set up multi-sectoral institutions to coordinate
development. But there is a lack of connections or co-ordination between these
efforts, and the large-scale UN humanitarian operations.