How can we prevent the next famine? The case for disaster risk reduction

Duncan Green in the "From Poverty to Power" blog at Oxfam's website: When it comes to natural disasters, and their very un-natural impact on poor people, prevention is better than cure. Yet this lesson seems incredibly hard to turn into practice, because however good the early warning system in the run-up to disasters like the current crisis in East Africa, the money to head off future suffering often doesn’t start flowing until the images of human suffering hit the TV screens.

This is all the more frustrating because as a new paper by Oxfam’s humanitarian policy adviser, Debbie Hillier, argues, we know far more than we used to about how to do this preventive work (known in the deadening jargon of development as DRR – disaster risk reduction) and just how much more cost effective it is than waiting for disaster to strike before reacting. Whilst it is too simplistic to give an overarching cost benefit ratio (often quoted as 1:4 or 1:7), studies have shown time and time again that good prevention saves lives and money. Protecting livestock is much cheaper than rebuilding them once they have been decimated by drought: in the Afar region of Ethiopia, restocking sheep and goats cost 6.5 times more than supplementary feeding, and restocking cattle cost 14 times more. According to the International Federation of the Red Cross, it costs around £3.50 person per year to build up resilience, compared to £150 per person for relief assistance for just three or four months.

DRR also ensures that aid and government investments remain effective. All aid – whether humanitarian, development, recovery/reconstruction – should be resilient to disasters. Otherwise, hospitals, schools, roads and water points (as well as livelihoods) can be damaged or washed away when a natural hazard strikes. Between 1997 and 2007, Ethiopia lost on average US$1.1bn to drought every year, almost eclipsing the US$1.3bn per year in international assistance to tackle poverty and emergencies over the same period, and exceeding the amount Ethiopia invested in agriculture, a sector clearly crucial to ending food shortages....

This NASA image by Jesse Allen shows plant growth during the growing season for the crop normally harvested in June and July. The image was made with observations from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on the NOAA-18 POES satellite, which records the amount of light plants in a broad region absorb during photosynthesis. Where there were more leafy photosynthesizing plants than average, the image is green. Brown indicates that plants were sparser or growing less than average.