UN WARNS ON SEVERE DROUGHT IN HORN OF AFRICA

The recent dry spell which caused worries among farmers in the northern regions may, after all, be enough signal on the reeling drought next door in Africa.

A just released United Nations report has warned that eastern Africa and the Horn of Africa should brace for devastating impacts of rain failures.

"Africa is the hardest hit continent", said the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in its global drought assessment report.

It cited what it described as "debilitating drought" in the East and the Horn of Africa,saying it was one of the consequences of climate change.

Africa, the report said, has suffered 134 recorded droughts in the past one century, with ove a half in East Africa and the adjacent states to its north.

Recently, there have been reports of devastating impacts of droughts in Ethiopia, Somalia and northern Kenya, threatening food security to millions of people.

As many as 20 million people in the eastern Horn of Africa are facing food shortages and extreme hardships; killing 1.5 million livestock.

In the Marsabit county in Kenya bordering Ethiopia, poor rains have slashed harvest by as much as 70 percent, starving over 100,000 goats and sheep to death.

UNCCD is the UN agency mandated to mitigate the effects of drought and desertification through national action programmes and global partnerships.

It is the only convention stemming from a direct recommendation of the famous Rio Conference's Agenda 21 held in Brazil in 1992.

It is also the only internationally legally binding framework set up to address the problem of desertification threatening one third of the world's land surface.

The agency's lead scientist Barron Orr said during the recent UNCCD conference of parties that the next step for hardest hit Africa was "to direct investments to build resilience".

Besides Africa,the duration and severe impacts of droughts were more pronounced in the resource-poor developing countries.

Among the key findings of the report was a 29 percent rise in the number and duration of droughts since 2000.

In economic terms, droughts have caused economic losses equivalent to about $124 million from 1998 to 2017.