CS Omamo: Hunger threatens peace, stability in Horn of Africa

Extreme drought in the Horn of Africa could cause up to 20 million people to go hungry in 2022 and make sustaining peace more difficult said Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs Raychelle Omamo. 

Citing similar links between food shortages and instability in Yemen, Afghanistan and the Sahel region, she said the war in Ukraine is now claiming victims around the world as food prices soar.

She was speaking during the United Nations Security Council Ministerial meeting on Conflict and Food Security convened under the Presidency of the USA.

The meeting was chaired by the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.

In that connection, she welcomed the formation of the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance and called for “more than short-term actions in the hope of a return to the status quo”.

During the #UNSC Open Debate on Conflict & Food Security, CS Raychelle Omamo called for multilateral & national ambition to sharply scale up Africa’s agricultural productivity. She decried solutions seeking a return to the status quo; terming that status quo as having been flawed pic.twitter.com/9MkLMekCxT

— Permanent Mission of Kenya to the UN 🇰🇪 🇺🇳 (@KenyaMissionUN) May 19, 2022

Bold solutions are needed to tackle the food crisis, she said, citing the increasingly certain projection that Africa’s population will reach 2.5 billion by 2050.

In that context, she called for a shift in the continent’s place in the global trading system from a source of raw materials to a place of modern agricultural systems with more access to cash and investments as well as debt restructuring and efforts to build bridges among humanitarian assistance, development and peace building.

CS Omamo also urged the international community to unite in upholding values of market openness with the understanding that food security is a transnational problem.