Sunday May 22, 2022
With government and public attention locked on Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine, there are growing fears that other humanitarian crises — such
as those gripping Afghanistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa — will worsen
without drastic intervention.
An estimated 19 million Afghans — nearly half of the
population — are experiencing extreme food insecurity in a crisis that has
escalated dramatically since the U.S. withdrew in August, ending two decades of
military presence.
In Yemen, around two-thirds of the population, or 19 million
people, also face food insecurity in a country heavily reliant on aid handouts.
Some 14 million people in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia are on the brink of
starvation.
Robert Mardini, director-general of the International
Committee of the Red Cross, said the organization was “starting to see some
decline” in global humanitarian funding since the beginning of the Ukrainian
crisis.
“With the limelight on Ukraine — with all the support that
Ukraine deserves and will continue to get — will that be to the detriment of
other crises? Time will tell,” he said.
Mardini said his organization’s humanitarian activities for
2022 were only 42 percent funded, compared with 52 percent at the same point in
2021.
Athena Rayburn, director of advocacy, communications and
campaigns at Save the Children Afghanistan, said the situation in the country
had deteriorated markedly since the U.S. withdrawal. Denied the headlines that
accompanied the momentous events of just nine months ago, she fears there is
worse to come.
“Every single social safety net that existed prior to August
has been gutted. Schools are shut, hospitals are shut, and food, fuel and rent
prices have all gone up. It’s driving people into a state of desperation,” she
said.
Rayburn said governments were dipping into their
humanitarian aid budgets earmarked for Afghanistan and other crisis-hit
countries to “make room for their response to the Ukraine.”
Reports surfaced last month that Germany had even evicted
Afghan refugees from their accommodations in order to make way for arrivals
from Ukraine.
“There are a lot of dynamics around Ukraine as to why it is
getting so much attention,” Rayburn said. “If you look at the public swell of
support compared to the scale of the crisis in Afghanistan, that’s completely
faded.”
As well as diverting the attention of governments and the
public, there is mounting evidence that the war in Ukraine will worsen crises
around the world, siphoning off development aid while causing the price of some
goods to spiral.
Daniel Maxwell, Henry J. Leir Professor in Food Security at
Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, said the war was adversely impacting countries
already struggling to deal with the spiraling cost of wheat and maize.
“The invasion of Ukraine has had all these knock-on effects
in terms of price and therefore makes all of those crises more severe because
they’re all food-importing countries,” he said.
“With all the attention in the media and the sort of
geopolitical priorities that Ukraine comprises, the amount of additional
assistance for other parts of the world I think is going to be pretty
constrained,” Maxwell said. “We should be able to think about two problems at
once. But I’m not sure that there’s evidence that we’re fully doing that.”
In Yemen, a conflict has raged since a Saudi-led coalition
of Gulf states launched an assault on Houthi insurgents in 2015.
The already impoverished nation has endured hunger, disease
and poverty ever since.
“Many families haven’t seen fruit or vegetables in months,
meat for even longer,” said Sukaina Sharafuddin, a Yemeni aid worker. “I met a
mother with five children, and I asked her what she feeds them. She said some
days she just boils water with spices and they drink that as there is no food for
a proper meal.”
Mardini warned that essential services such as health care
and sanitation “are on the brink of collapse” across the country.
A United Nations fundraising conference for Yemen in March
drummed up pledges of $1.3 billion in humanitarian assistance. Although this
was welcomed by organizers, it amounted to less than a third of what the U.N.
says is needed, making 2022 the sixth year that Yemen’s aid response has not
been fully funded.
In March, the Disasters Emergency Committee, a British aid
agency coalition, launched an appeal for Ukraine that raised $240 million in
its first two weeks. The equivalent appeal for Yemen, in December 2016, raised
$36 million.
Sharafuddin said the disparity in public fundraising was due
to people in donor nations “feeling more connected to what’s happening in
Ukraine.”
“When they hear about Yemen, they focus on the political
coverage, which worries or scares them,” she said. “The reality is that
underneath all this it is real people who are the victims. My opinion, as a
Yemeni and as a mother, is that if governments got involved, this could all end
tomorrow.”
The humanitarian community has long struggled to hold public
attention on crises that drag on interminably, such as Syria’s civil war, which
just entered its 11th year.
Whether it is donor fatigue or a lack of media coverage,
audiences are increasingly struggling to keep their attention on multiple
disasters at once, according to Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, professor of philosophy
at the University of North Dakota.
She said the advent of 24-hour news and social media has
left people inundated with information that may or may not be relevant to their
interests, squeezing their bandwidth and effectively “training us to skip
around from one issue to the next.”
“That’s not to mention the emotional and mental
psychological capability to sort out and to feel effective in responding to
these multiple crises, many are on a global scale,” Rozelle-Stone said. “Many
of us in our local context feel powerless to even begin to address something
like what’s happening in Ukraine.”
Nor is the media necessarily equipped to deliver coverage on
ongoing disasters.
Susan D. Moeller, professor of media and international
affairs at the University of Maryland and author of “Compassion Fatigue: How
the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death,” said news organizations
struggle to retain audience interest in long-running events.
“Media don’t cover stasis well. Things that have just broken
that we would consider an immediate crisis, whether it’s an earthquake or an
assassination, news jumps to cover it,” she said. “By month five or year five
in an ongoing conflict, it typically disappears.”
Without readily available coverage, members of the public
are far less likely to even be aware of a given humanitarian crisis, let alone
pressure their leaders to act upon it.
The Horn of Africa is undergoing its worst drought in 40 years,
leaving millions at risk of starving. Yet a poll last week commissioned by the
charity Christian Aid found that only 23 percent of respondents had even heard
of that crisis.
This is compared with 91 percent who said they were aware of
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Abdikarim Mohamed, regional spokesman for the ICRC in East
Africa, said people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya were now nearly totally
reliant on state-backed aid “because people just don’t seem interested” in
helping.
“Yes, this issue is not new. Yes, there is donor fatigue,”
he said. “But the scale of the problem is now hitting levels where we need
governments to focus to try to prevent these people dying.”
Patrick Galey
Patrick Galey is contributing reporter for NBCNews.com, based in France.