Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

The first time I saw desperate people queueing for their turn at a water pump was in Somalia in 1992. I was in the capital, Mogadishu, reporting for Dutch media, as clans fought to take the place of the fallen President Siad Barre.

There was the sound of gunfire; people waiting by the pump scattered. A man fell and stayed down. When the shooting stopped, the line reformed as if nothing had happened. The dead man was quietly stepped over.

The world was indignant, much as now. Aid agencies were reporting that half the Somali population could die of starvation. There was food aid — and Somalia is still on the Western drip — but it was not getting through to the hungry. Five hundred UN blue helmets from Pakistan could not deter the clans from robbing food convoys. The US cavalry came to the rescue.

The invasion of the American Army was shown live on prime-time television. Soldiers landed on the beach at Mogadishu blinded by the flashlights and floodlights of the international media. The first food convoy, guarded by American military, was soon on its way. CNN followed, showing moving images of GIs, covered with recently fed Somali children and — this being the run-up to Christmas — singing Jingle Bells at the top of their voices.

Nothing was solved, except temporarily. The aid flow stopped, as it always does, and hunger has raised its ugly head every few years ever since. The Horn of Africa has seen crises in 1999-2000, 2002-03, 2005-06 and 2008-09. Each time the response has been the same: a humanitarian and media caravan, with telethons and celebrities scrambling to the rescue. But the circus always comes far too late to address anything but the worst symptoms.

The current crisis was predicted 12 months ago. Drought-resistant crops could have been planted, food reserves could have been directed to strategic points and measures could have been taken to keep livestock alive. All that would have been cheaper than the emergency feeding of millions.

But most of the dozens of aid organisations working in the Horn of Africa, some since the Eighties and Nineties, are not pursuing a long-term strategy. Take the reception camps in Dadaab, north Kenya, where there is a lack of medical care, food, water and shelter. In 2009, before the current crisis, when the camps had "only" 270,000 inhabitants, 13 per cent were (severely) malnourished. There were 36,000 too few latrines and 40,000 too few shelters. Cholera and other epidemics succeeded each other because of lack of medical care and hygiene. Mortality figures were much higher than what the aid organisations themselves considered acceptable. The agencies running Dadaab were severely criticised by Human Rights Watch: the three camps, it said, resembled ghettos more than refugee camps.

The aid agencies in these camps are the world's biggest and richest. The UNHCR has a budget of about $3 billion a year; its most important partners in the crisis, Unicef and the World Health Organisation, have about $9 billion a year between them. It makes one wonder where the aid giants direct their resources if not to the continuing emergency in their camps in north Kenya.

There is another flaw in the aid system. Funds are not always redirected when that would be appropriate. Partly, that is because some NGOs only implement programmes that fit in with their own corporate strategies; partly, because the international aid bureaucracy prevents it.

So money for building schools and temporary housing in Haiti must be spent on schools and housing, even if those projects cannot go ahead because of lack of land. This year in and around Port-au-Prince, I witnessed cholera treatment centres closing for lack of funds even as people were dying from the disease. Hundreds of lives are still being lost to cholera, while an estimated half of the money that was raised for Haiti still sits in the bank accounts of aid organisations waiting for the "right" time to spend it.

Emergency aid will not avert the next crisis in the Horn of Africa; it has even made past ones worse. The World Food Programme was accused of feeding the Somali war as much as it fed the Somali people, according to the Monitoring Group on Somalia, an independent institution that reports to the UN Security Council.

Armed groups not only control access by the NGOs to needy communities but seek to exert control over aid resources for their own purposes. Some agencies routinely pay them off for "protection": aid convoys are "taxed" or forced to surrender some of their cargo at checkpoints.

The aid community accepts a certain level of theft and diversion as the cost of doing business in Somalia. That is why the Monitoring Group focused its investigations not on such routine practices but on "large-scale, egregious and systematic" theft of humanitarian assistance. It alleged that half of the WFP budget for Somalia — $200 million a year at the time — had been disappearing, mostly into war chests, year in year out, for 12 years. Local WFP staff and the militant al-Shabab were allegedly among those sharing the profits of the sale of WFP food. The WFP denied most of the allegations as hearsay and investigations continue.

The Africans who eat our food aid this year will need more food aid next year, or the year after. And the regimes, armed gangs and the aid community will thrive too in this climate of perpetual crisis. We can break the cycle. Stop reacting to hunger and crises with emergency aid and get serious about funding long-term strategies. All the players in the circus know this must happen. The public has to insist that it does.

Linda Polman is the author of War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times