In the Zamzam displaced persons camp, children were dying for months before it was found to be in famine. Here’s how the world’s hunger monitoring-and-response system is supposed to work – and why it’s not achieving its mission.
A global warning-and-response system is supposed to prevent the kind of catastrophe unfolding at Sudan’s Zamzam camp, where famine threatens the lives of an estimated 500,000 people uprooted by decades of civil war.
Vast and intricate, the system binds together several arms of the United Nations, humanitarian groups, rich donor nations and hundreds of technical experts who parse data for signs of starvation. And it sends billions of dollars of aid annually to needy nations.
But in Zamzam – and in many other hunger spots around the world – this safety net is failing.
At the core of the system is the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Created to help manage a 2004 hunger crisis in Somalia, the IPC evolved into an international framework that uses data to analyze food insecurity. It is meant to help prevent famine by providing donors and humanitarian organizations unbiased information they need to make strategic decisions about how to deploy aid.
The framework is overseen by 19 large humanitarian aid and intergovernmental organizations, known as global partners. Funded by Western governments, the IPC monitors food insecurity in more than 35 countries and publishes periodic evaluations.
To produce those reports, the IPC relies on a consortium of non-governmental aid organizations (NGOs), government ministries and technical analysts.
The IPC’s five-phase classification system charts food insecurity on a progressive scale, from minimal at Phase 1 to catastrophic at Phase 5. The IPC recommends action at every phase. But to ward off food emergencies and famine, it says urgent humanitarian response is needed beginning in Phase 3, which is considered a crisis.
How conflict disrupts the hunger watchdogs
The IPC’s analyses, including famine determinations, use rigorously vetted data on crop yields, food prices, malnutrition and other factors scientifically linked to food security.
A team of statisticians, health workers and aid organizations is supposed to analyze the data and produce regular reports. The team is typically headed by the government of the country being assessed.
But in Sudan, the war has upended data collection. Violence, military checkpoints and movement restrictions make it unsafe or impossible to gather information in many areas, and the data that’s harvested sometimes fails to meet the IPC’s standards.
Similar problems are tripping up the IPC in other troubled lands it monitors, including Gaza, Yemen and Ethiopia. (See related story.)…
Read the full report with Infographics here.
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