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Over the past week, food security and nutrition professionals have been gathered in a hotel in Juba, to debate whether the situation in areas of South Sudan should be declared a famine. To inform this work, a small team including the UN, Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FewsNet) and Save the Children staff (myself included), travelled by helicopter to remote areas of the most affected state, Unity, to verify information provided.
We did not find famine. But what we did find was still deeply concerning: families who are consuming very low volumes of food, rising malnutrition rates (particularly amongst women), reduced livestock numbers and reduced planting, with most families expecting less than a third of their usual crop production.
According to the five-point Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) scale being used, these indicators are consistent with IPC phase 4, "emergency", but not IPC phase 5, "famine". This is good news – many thought a famine declaration was inevitable.
However, in practice this means that it will be much harder for humanitarian actors to raise the funds necessary to help people who are already faced with terrible conditions, and to prevent the situation from deteriorating further.
As FewsNet's Chris Hillbruner recently said: "If it's as bad as famine, a declaration can have a significant impact on the level of support that goes toward the crisis". The rapid rise in media interest as the 'f' word started to circulate, provides further proof of Hillbruner's statement. Although IPC phase 4 still denotes an emergency, there will now be little media interest, almost certainly no Disaster Emergency Committee appeal, and probably no sharp rise in funding.
What is happening is not a new problem and was documented following the Horn of Africa famine in 2011. A study on the crisis found that more deaths occurred during the period before the large humanitarian scale up, (phase 4), not phase 5. Several reports at the time highlighted the issues that need to be addressed in order to prevent a similar situation occurring:
• The humanitarian community, including donors, governments and senior decision makers need to be prepared to act early and not wait for certainty of a disaster.
• There is a need for a cooperative approach which links assessments and actions, allowing for rapid, collective decision making.
• Long-term funding mechanisms (government or development programming) need to incorporate flexibility so that they can be scaled up or down easily.
But three years later in South Sudan it is clear these issues have not been sufficiently addressed. In particular, while we have seen an improvement in early warning systems, and flexible funding within longer-term programmes, early action among humanitarians is lagging.
In South Sudan food security issues were noted shortly after the conflict broke out in January and IPC phase 4 has been formally declared since early May, yet there are still many affected areas which have not received any form of food or livelihoods assistance.
The typical hunger season and planting season both fall during the rainy season (April to November) when large parts of the country can only be reached by helicopter. This means that if an emergency is impending, stocks of seeds and food need to be ready months before the peak time of need to avoid expensive and complicated aid delivery. Unfortunately this means that funding is required even earlier, and the humanitarian community is unable to forecast with high levels of certainty exactly what the scale of that need will be.
Some NGOs have managed to act early, but it has often remained difficult to convince donors. Late funding leads to late delivery of seeds to affected areas. If the seeds had been available to communities in the right quantity at the right time, the harvest in September would have recovered. Now the harvest will be less than adequate and if full funding for seed delivery is not received before October, famine is likely to hit South Sudan in the first half of 2015.
There is certainly more that humanitarian agencies, working closely with governments, can do to promote early action. However, donors also need to make earlier decisions to mobilise funds before situations escalate. As donors are often responsive to the public they serve, perhaps it is time to change the narrative. It is often felt that the public will not be interested until dying children are visible. Perhaps, the current situation in South Sudan is showing that, three years on from the Horn of Africa crisis, we need to find a way to attract funding before dying children start to appear on our televisions screens.
Davina Jeffery is food security and livelihoods advisor at Save the Children.
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