CARE featured in a Reuters article about the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system in conflict Zones. Dalmar Ainashe, CARE’s Senior Technical Advisor, was quoted.
“If we can’t access critical information, confirming a famine becomes impossible – and so does saving lives,” said Dalmar Ainashe, a food-security analyst with relief group CARE. For 10 years, Ainashe served as a member of the IPC Technical Advisory Group, which provides expert advice to IPC’s leadership. He also has recounted how he survived a famine as a child in his native Somalia.
“In the chaos of conflict, clinging to unattainable quantitative thresholds isn’t just unrealistic,” Ainashe told Reuters. “It’s a fatal oversight that risks abandoning entire populations to suffer and die in silence.”
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Ainashe, the analyst with relief group CARE, said the IPC should change its approach in besieged areas. The monitor, he said, should accept not just numerical data for some of the thresholds it uses to determine famine. For instance, he said, the IPC could conclude a famine is occurring when at least 20% of households are suffering from extreme hunger – a threshold it currently adheres to – while also using on-the-ground anecdotal information from doctors, families and aid workers indicating that malnutrition and mortality rates are rising fast. The system, Ainashe said, must “err on the side of saving lives.”
Full article can be found here.