Wealth Pools International

A mockery of famine early warning systems

Little has changed – it still takes a declaration of famine for the world to take notice, despite major investments in regular monitoring. This makes a mockery of famine early warning systems that are intended to produce a graded response. More disappointing is that the UN is juggling the different famine mortality benchmarks in order to be able to declare that famine is occurring and launch the media response. Famine mortality benchmarks were first set in 1991 and since have been confirmed in 2009 by an international technical group . But the UN earlier this week resorted to using a lower benchmark for defining famine which was equivalent to an under-five death rate of 4 per 10,000 per day.

The reason for this is unclear, given that some mortality indicators in Somalia are within the recommended higher benchmark level (13.2 and 20.3), except that it gives the UN more opportunity to use the emotive F-word and so grab the headlines. Some population groups in Somalia have regularly shown unacceptably high rates of acute malnutrition over the past 20 years, and the cumulative deaths over this time are almost certainly record-breaking. So why is it that these long-established monitoring systems are only able to justify and elicit such a response when they can describe the many lives lost as a famine in the media?

Helen Young Feinstein International Center

• You didn't quite join the ranks of the barroom bigots with your leader on international aid (20 July), but will certainly have helped confirm their prejudices. You say we have "little to show for [our] efforts" – that's rich, given that developed countries have repeatedly and brazenly broken their promises in this regard. Anyway, it's a travesty of the truth: nearly 7 million people are receiving treatment for Aids, 16 times as many as in 2003; an extra 40 million children are in school; maternal mortality has been reduced by 30%, etc. "Little to show" indeed!

But that isn't even half of it! We shouldn't delude ourselves that we are really giving them anything. Unfair trade rules, tax fiddles by big corporations and debt repayments each cost poor countries far more than they get in aid . And those things don't take into account our habit of "poaching" many of their brightest and best-trained people, nor the impacts of climate change, for which we are responsible. What is a constant source of amazement to me is that poor countries have made any progress at all. But they have: as Salil Shetty, director of the UN Millennium Campaign, put it last year , "Instead of lamenting that Africa might miss the MDG targets, we should be celebrating the real changes that have happened in the lives of millions of poor people".