By The EastAfrican

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The numbers are depressing but it was not completely unexpected. The greater Horn of Africa is in the throes of yet another hunger crisis for the usual reasons – failed rains, conflict and political instability. Estimates vary but according to the alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa AGRAA’s Food Security Monitor, as many as 50 million people are at the risk of hunger across the region.

The acuteness of the crisis is accentuated by the fact that even previously presumed food baskets such as Uganda, which are relatively stable; have an unacceptably high risk of exposure to hunger. Some 13 million people are starving in the Horn alone, 5.7 million of them in Ethiopia, the host of the African Union headquarters.

Coming two decades after the ambitious Maputo Declaration, under which states committed to spending 10 percent of their Gross Domestic Product to Agriculture and Food Security and rural development t within 5 years; it should have been embarrassing for the signatories if they were not so thick-skinned and impervious to public opinion.

As it is, only 9 of Africa’s 55 AU, member states, among them Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Nigeria and Senegal, have achieved the modest milestone of meeting the Maputo target at least half-way. The listed countries are spending 6percent of their GDP on Agriculture.

Often blamed for hunger, conflict is both a cause and result of hunger. Hungry people are angry people that are quite prone to conflict over scarce resources. Reducing hunger and vulnerability over scarce resources such as water therefore, has a direct effect of either escalating or abating conflict.

The crisis in the Horn would and eastern Africa in general would not be that acute, if there were proactive politics and infrastructure and logistics for transferring food from areas of surplus to deficit. As hunger spreads, Tanzania possibly has enough surplus stock of rice to roll-back the dark cloud of hunger that is claiming the lives of infants and the aged across the wider region.

Add to that the vast acreage of arable but under-utilised or un-utilised land in the DRC, Central Africa, South Sudan; rudimentary farming methods, corruption where officials want to import grain cheaply to sell to millers at exorbitant prices; non-tariff-barrier, barriers to the movement of food relief and you see, is clearly a man-made crisis.

If Africa was serious about addressing its food crisis, it does not really need to reinvent the wheel. For instance, a farmer in Italy achieved 36 times the yield of tomatoes, from the same unit of land a as his counterpart in Uganda. With a few adjustments, Asia’s 1970’s Green Revolution, provides the perfect template for anyone who wants to take hunger head on.

Experience shows that countries that achieved sustainable development, eliminated two primary threats – hunger and containment of the pathogen responsible for the bulk of the disease burden. Africa’s primary challenge is bad politics which is at the root of under-investment and inefficient agricultural systems. That creates a vicious cycle of hunger which starts with undernourished people having a low productivity potential because of hunger and morbidity.

To break the cycle, it might be necessary to shove Africa out of its comfort zone, where malnutrition and death from hunger, are sure to trigger a Samaritan[M1] reaction from western audiences.