Nearly 13 million people in the Horn of Africa are suffering from the worst drought in 60 years, made worse by ongoing conflicts there. The U.N. estimates that nearly a million people will starve by years end without additional help, but many wonder where the money will come from. The U.S. has already contributed $593 million in aid, but Congressional budget cuts will likely translate to less money for future aid, which could have wide-ranging repercussions.

Guests

  • Jonathan Broder Senior Editor, Congressional Quarterly
  • Sheila Nix US Executive Director, ONE International

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Transcript

  • 13:06:45

    MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Later in the broadcast, the story behind an iconic Olympic image, a man who helped to create it and the consequences, the John Carlos story. But first, emaciated infants, desperate mothers, overcrowded refugee camps.

  • 13:07:19

    MR. KOJO NNAMDIRecent images from the Horn of Africa chronicle the all the familiar sights of famine. Nearly, 13 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti are feeling the effects of a lengthy drought and epic food shortages. And the hardest hit areas, food aid has reached only half of those in need. And budget shortfalls in the U.S. could translate to cuts in relief money that could have dire consequences.

  • 13:07:48

    MR. KOJO NNAMDIJoining us in studio to discuss the famine in the Horn of Africa is Sheila Nix, U.S. executive director of ONE, a nonpartisan, non-profit grassroots advocacy organization that fights poverty and preventable diseases, particularly in Africa. Sheila Nix, thank you for joining us.

  • 13:08:06

    MS. SHEILA NIXThank you for having me.

  • 13:08:07

    NNAMDIAlso joining with us is Jonathan Broder. He is senior editor at Congressional Quarterly. He recently write about U.S. aid for the magazine. Jonathan Broder, thank you for joining us.

  • 13:08:18

    MR. JONATHAN BRODERGood to be here, Kojo.

  • 13:08:19

    NNAMDISheila, the Horn of Africa is feeling the effects of the worst drought in some 60 years. But drought alone didn't bring this famine. What created this crisis?

  • 13:08:29

    NIXWell, there was a lack of investment in long term agriculture. It's interesting to see because in some parts of Africa and Kenya and Ethiopia, it actually -- it -- the -- we use the phrase, drought is inevitable but famine is not. They've invested in some new types of seeds, irrigation, farming practices and they've been able to lessen the impact. But in places where these investments have not occurred in Somalia and where there's also unstable government, those sources combined with a drought have caused, you know, the horrific images that you mentioned before.

  • 13:09:04

    NNAMDIJonathan Broder, there are also other factors, one of them being that the rising world population, is it not?

  • 13:09:10

    BRODERYeah, well, there are, sort of, two issues that we're talking about here. One is, places that are affected by famine because of climate change, because of drought, flooding, climate related environmental disasters. But you also have a second problem, which is the rising price of food around the world. Now, you know, anybody who goes shopping today knows that their food bill has gone up.

  • 13:09:40

    BRODERBut we, in the West, can absorb that. Means we'll go to a, you know, maybe, one less movie or we'll go out to eat a few times -- fewer times -- few -- fewer times. But in the developing world, in poor countries, people in those countries spend anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of their income on food. So when food prices go up, it has a devastating impact. Now, the cause of this -- of why food is going up are varied.

  • 13:10:11

    BRODERThere are a number of factors, one is the rising population, as you mentioned, of the world. Another is in very populous countries like India and China, where the middle class is rising, people are demanding more meat in their diet. So -- and that requires more feed for the animals and therefore less for people. And then, as I mentioned, there's the issue of climate change, with drought and flooding.

  • 13:10:40

    BRODERBut there are two others, as well. One is the rising price of oil which means that transporting food costs more and another is the amount of corn in the United States, for example, that's used for alternative fuels. Up to 1/3 of the corn crop in the United States is used for ethanol. And that means that there's that much less corn out there to eat.

  • 13:11:05

    NNAMDISheila Nix, Somalia is not the only country where famine is taking hold. But it does seem to be the hardest hit. Why is it so tough to get aid to Somali's in need?

  • 13:11:15

    NIXWell, there's a lot of issues around security and -- that's blocking the way for food to get in. But there's also been a complete lack of investment in terms of agriculture practices and process that would really help things. Like I mentioned before, in neighboring countries where the people are actually going to, Ethiopia and Kenya, they have the same conditions, but they've been able to make investments.

  • 13:12:01

    NIXThey have early warning systems in place now, they stockpile food, they were able to get ready. And so, when you take these steps, you can actually mitigate the outcome and make it a lot less. And, you know, now, especially in Somalia, there's a lot of people traveling along the road to get to the refugee camps where they can have access to food.

  • 13:12:01

    NIXAnd it's terrible situations for families. Like, in some cases, mothers have had to leave one of their children on the side of the road in order to save the rest. And it really, you know, the human impact in Somalia and, you know, and then in the refugee camps in Kenya, is really overwhelming.

  • 13:12:17

    NNAMDIYou mentioned the security aspect of it that would have to do in Somalia with the al-Shabaab militia.

  • 13:12:23

    NIXRight. That's right. And security issues are not something that one works on. We're more a long term development but we work with the international crisis group and they've put out some possible solutions. But the thing that we have to do right now is just to try to provide -- you know, to stop the crisis in Somalia where 30,000 children have died in the last three months and figure out a way, you know, with the world community to get in there and get the food where it's needed. And then continue to focus on the long term political situation and the future.

  • 13:12:53

    NNAMDIJonathan?

  • 13:12:54

    BRODERWell, getting back to the security aspect. You're right, it is the Al-Shabaab militia.

  • 13:13:01

    NNAMDIThey keep aid out of some of the hardest hit areas.

  • 13:13:03

    BRODERYes, exactly. You know, the one thing we have to remember is that, you know, in contrast to Kenya and Ethiopia, which have had these safety net programs, food safety net programs, since the drought in 2002, I believe it was. A lot of people are no longer facing famine and food insecurity. Somalia has not had a government since around the early 1990s.

  • 13:13:34

    BRODERAnd the Shabaab militia is a Islamic fundamentalist group, aligned with al-Qaeda and they are deeply, deeply distrustful of the West. And therefore they're not allowing food aid to go into Somalia. And in some cases, they're preventing people from leaving. So the combination of the inability of aid groups to bring food in, plus the fact that al-Shabaab will physically and, you know, try to stop people from leaving, they kill them if they try to leave, has created a situation of manmade famine, really.

  • 13:14:18

    BRODERAnd unless there is some political solution in Somalia, I don’t see the United States willing to go back into Somalia after the fiasco in the early '90s, the Black hawk Down -- so-called Black hawk Down period. That, if we all remember, was a humanitarian mission. There's no appetite for that now.

  • 13:14:39

    NNAMDICuts are expected to have an effect on most Congressional spending. How much might foreign aid be scaled back and what's the potential fallout?

  • 13:14:47

    BRODERWell, there are a number of bills out there now. The two bills that are most important in foreign aid are the foreign-ops bill where the development aid budget comes out of and also the agriculture bill where emergency food aid comes from. That's the so-called PL 480 aid. The house would like to reduce agricultural aid and PL 480 aid by 30 percent. The senate version or the senate sub-committee version of that bill would probably reduce it by about 15 percent.

  • 13:15:28

    BRODERSo the best case scenario is a 15 percent cut. Now, just to give you an idea of how that translates on the ground, the world food aid program -- the world food program at the U.N. calculates that it costs roughly a $100 million a year to feed 2.5 million people for a year. So for every $100 million of cuts and I know that these numbers sound paltry when you are talking about trillion dollar trimmings of the budget. But a $100 million denies food to 2.5 million. So the republicans are talking about roughly $700 million dollars in cuts.

  • 13:16:18

    NIXOne of the other interesting things too is both in the short term, humanitarian aid but there's also threats to the long-term to feed the future program that invests in long-term agriculture. And that's so interesting because if you spend $1 on helping people do better agriculture practices now, you can save $10 in humanitarian relief in the next year.

  • 13:16:38

    NIXSo it's really important that, when we're talking about the short-term crisis, it's clear that we need to get involved right now and try to put a stop to that and save the moms and the children. But we also have to not forget that if we make some small investments right now, it'll have a huge impact. And in Africa, 70 percent of the farmers are women and if you can increase their family income, just a little bit by using better agriculture practices, they invest that money in health care for their children and education.

  • 13:17:07

    NIXSo it goes a lot way. So we want to make sure of that as we think about things that we don't do, short term cuts now that really make the United States government pay more later.

  • 13:17:17

    NNAMDII know your organization, ONE, wants Congress to fully fund the Feed the Future program and that may, it would appear, is likely to be cut. But your organization premiered a new start studded video today. Let's take a listen to a bit of it.

  • 13:18:26

    NNAMDIOkay. The idea is intentionally provocative with celebrities and politicals including Bono, Lauren and Jenna Bush, Idris Elba, Arianna Huffington and Mike Huckabee, to name a few, unleashing a string of expletives or are they?

  • 13:18:40

    NIXWell, what they're really saying is famine is the real obscenity. And as you mentioned, the ad is a little provocative, but we want to call attention to this. I mean, there's more in the news about celebrity break-ups then there is about the famine in Ethiopia. And so we decided to use some celebrity voices, just to bring attention to this issue to...

  • 13:19:01

    NNAMDISure got my attention.

  • 13:19:02

    NIX...more people. Yeah. Yeah, it has gotten a lot...

  • 13:19:05

    NNAMDII was, like, what are they saying?

  • 13:19:07

    NIXAnd we were able to get some unusual bed fellows. You know, some, like you said, Mike Huckabee, Jenna and Barbara Bush, along with some celebrities and Bono and K'naan and so we were, you know, very pleased that all of these people would help us participate and call attention to this in a slightly provocative way. But actually to make the point that famine is the real obscenity.

  • 13:19:28

    NNAMDIHere is Megan in Tacoma Park, Md. Could you don your headsets, please? Megan, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

  • 13:19:35

    MEGANHi, I was just wondering, what percent of the U.S. budget is designated for foreign aid? I've heard that it's an incredibly small amount and when I'm arguing with people about the validity of sending aid elsewhere. I get told that, we can't afford to.

  • 13:19:55

    NNAMDIJonathan.

  • 13:19:56

    BRODERIt's a very, very small percentage. A lot of people think that food aid or foreign aid is about to 10 to 20 percent of our budget. In fact, it's about, what, one percent?

  • 13:20:05

    NIXYeah, just under one percent.

  • 13:20:06

    BRODERYeah.

  • 13:20:06

    NNAMDIJust under one percent.

  • 13:20:07

    BRODERYeah.

  • 13:20:07

    NNAMDIThere's a one percent movement, as a matter of fact...

  • 13:20:09

    NIXThat's right.

  • 13:20:09

    NNAMDI...for people who are in town to try to get it up to one percent, right?

  • 13:20:12

    NIXYeah. We actually had a conference yesterday and I was one of the panelists where we really made the point that it's an important piece of information because when the public finds out and when individuals, constituents find out that it's less than one percent, their support for foreign aid goes up and the opposition decreases. So it's a very, Megan, it's a very important piece of information to have and to get out among your friends so that we can let members of Congress know that we actually -- there's constituents in their congressional districts that support this.

  • 13:20:43

    NNAMDIMegan, here's Jonathan Broder.

  • 13:20:44

    BRODERThere's one other argument that can be made in defense of increasing foreign aid. And that is that sooner or later, the United States can't -- is not an island unto itself and what happens in these countries, overseas, when you have famine and food insecurity, they cause political instability and many times, in parts of the world, that are of great strategic interest, a national interest to us. So the choice really is, do we invest a little bit of money now to create food security and political stability as opposed to paying a lot of money down the line when we have to send soldiers in? Which is very, very expensive.

  • 13:21:27

    NNAMDIAnd Megan, thank you very much for your call. We're running out of time but Jonathan, the short term consequences of a failure to act on this are awful enough with the U.N. projecting 750,000 people will die by the end of the year without additional aid but there are potential long term consequences for the U.S. too, which you were, in part, just referring to.

  • 13:21:49

    BRODERYes, well, what happens -- and this gets back to what Sheila was talking about, in terms of the importance of long term food aid, of long term food aid to create food security. What happens is, is that when the price of food goes up, in these poor countries where people, as I said before, are spending anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of their income on food, when the price of, let's say, wheat or corn goes up by -- from 50 to 80 percent, what happens is, is that the income that they're bringing in, no longer covers their food bill.

  • 13:22:23

    BRODERSo they have to take their children out of school so they can work to earn enough money to meet their food bills. That means that children are not educated, also if they don't get enough food, they suffer both physical and cognitive disabilities from the inability to get enough nutrition. So you end up with a generation of under educated and physically and cognitively challenged people.

  • 13:22:55

    NNAMDISheila Nix, so if more or enough money is unlikely to come from governments, our own or others for that matter, across the world, what can people do to help?

  • 13:23:04

    NIXWell, there's a couple things. One, first, they can help make that not a reality. If they let their elected officials know that they care about this, then that puts pressure on them to actually increase funding or at least not cut it. So if you go to ONE.org, you'll find all kinds of ways that you can link in with your individual member of Congress.

  • 13:23:22

    NIXWe also have offices around the world. So it's not only in the United States that we're lobbying governments but elsewhere. And there are, obviously, involvement with people's churches and private donations that they can do. But the important thing is, that at ONE we're not asking for your money, we're asking for your voice, and everyone's voice matters. And if your voice weighs in, with your elected official, we can actually make a difference on this.

  • 13:23:48

    NNAMDIAnd I'm afraid that's all the time we have. Except that I think we're getting a phone call from Capitol Hill that I will pause for a few more minutes to make sure that that phone call is there. It is not. So we have come to the end of this segment. Sheila Nix, thank you so much for joining us.

  • 13:24:01

    NIXThank you, Kojo. Thank you very much.

  • 13:24:02

    NNAMDISheila Nix is the U.S. executive director of ONE which is a nonpartisan, non-profit grassroots advocacy organization that fights poverty and preventable diseases, particularly in Africa. Jonathan Broder, thank you for joining us.

  • 13:24:15

    BRODERMy pleasure.

  • 13:24:15

    NNAMDIJonathan Broder is a senior editor at Congressional Quarterly. He recently wrote about U.S. Aid for the magazine. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, the story behind an iconic Olympic image and the man who helped to create it, the consequences he faced, the John Carlos story. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

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