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Dispatches from Disaster Zones: telling the story of hunger

By Sarah Oughton
October 4, 2011 at 12:24 pm

Every night 925 million people go to bed hungry. And sometimes it gets so bad the media throws a spotlight on the crisis, such as the current situation in east Africa.

Seeing as aid agencies have been sounding the alarm about east Africa since last November, it begs the question: why wasn’t more done to avert the current crisis?

At Dispatches from Disaster Zones, an event hosted by the Red Cross at the Commonwealth Club on 30 September, this was the hot topic of debate between aid agencies and journalists.

“There are very brief windows of opportunity to cover long-term development stories,” said Tom Parry, Daily Mirror journalist. “When I was in Kenya recently, agencies wouldn’t address the Al Shabaab situation but it’s impossible to not link the political with the humanitarian situation – we need to address the reasons why people are fleeing Somalia.”

This year has been a particularly crowded news agenda and aid agencies struggled to get coverage of the evolving situation in east Africa when competing with crises related to the Arab Spring and of course the phone hacking scandal.

Journalists argue that if aid agencies were able to talk more about the whole picture it would help their cause.

While acknowledging there is a need to be more honest about the realities of aid and its problems, David Peppiatt, international director at the British Red Cross, said: “Engaging in the political is enormously challenging, if we commented on politics in Somalia it would have grave consequences for our work there. We have seen this happen before in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.”

For communicators at aid agencies, telling the story of a slowly developing disaster is a huge challenge. With a story like the Haiti earthquake there is immediate drama and the press will be all over it. But hunger in east Africa is a familiar and repetitive story. It lacks drama and is fairly inaccessible making it difficult to get press coverage – particularly before famine is declared.

Another often repeated gripe of aid agencies is that journalists don’t get the complexity of a disaster, for example Haiti, where it was reported that the emergency response was not quick enough.

But Dominic Nutt, associate director of communications and campaigns at World Vision, insists it’s the aid agencies’ responsibility to tell the story well, whatever the circumstances. He said: “We want to get the complex story out and yet we are guilty of destroying the complexity we want through our own marketing that says: give us £2 and you can help us save the world.

“All of us are scared of being thrown out of countries with corrupt governments, so we won’t stand up and say the government is responsible for starving children – we self edit.

“We need to accept that we need to challenge ourselves first before moaning about the media. There are times when we need to be political. When many are starving and many are fat – it’s about politics.”

For the World Food Programme (WFP) working in Somalia there is acute awareness of the complexity of the context, having lost 14 staff in its operation there since 2008.

Caroline Hurford, head of WFP liaison office in London, said: “I’m heartened by the way aid agencies are getting together to tell the story and the more we can do that and tell the story more clearly, the better.

“We do know the situation on the ground and can edge people in the right direction even if we can’t speak on record. We try to get others, like Oxfam, to talk about it as they can talk more blatantly. We can create critical mass by working together.”

Right now, aid agencies are focusing on telling the story of hunger and famine in east Africa and doing all they can to raise funds to save lives.

But when the famine is over, the even harder story to sell is ongoing food insecurity – the daily grind that millions face to get enough food to feed their families.

Yet malnutrition is the world’s number one health risk with more people dying from hunger than HIV, TB and malaria combined. The shocking fact is: almost one billion people go hungry when there is enough food produced to feed everyone in the world.

Throughout October, the Red Cross is running a campaign to tell the complex story of food insecurity. Watch our new video and find out more about what can be done to help break the cycle of poverty and hunger.

Image 1 © Jose Cendon/IFRC

Image 2 & 3 © Katrina Crew/BRC

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Tags: aid workers, dfdz, Dispatches from Disaster Zones, East Africa, famine, food crisis, food insecurity, Horn of Africa, hunger, journalists, media

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Emergencies, International, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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