Why the Food Crisis in Gaza is so Different From Other Famines
An interview with the CEO of Mercy Corps
I’ve covered humanitarian crises for nearly 20 years. Some of these crises have either teetered on the edge of famine, or in some cases developed into full blown famines that killed hundreds of thousands of people. In the last 10 years, I’ve covered several different crises like this: Somalia in 2022 and 2017, Madagascar in 2021, Tigray in 2021, Yemen in 2017 and South Sudan in 2014.
What binds each of these crises is that they festered off the radar of western media and policymakers for a very long time before becoming a full-blown food crisis. To be sure, each of these situations were different. But they were similar for the fact that they were largely ignored by powerful governments that could have mustered a response but did not. These crises were just never that important to Washington or Brussels, so they tilted into catastrophe.
This is certainly not the case of Gaza in 2024. This is the exceedingly rare crisis that is both commanding the attention of senior policy makers around the world and an incipient famine. This almost never happens.
It is hard to convey just how aberrant this is for the humanitarian community. They are used to responding to famines. They are not used to responding to what is happening in Gaza today.
My interview guest this week is Mercy Corps CEO Tjada D’Oyen McKenna. Mercy Corps is a large international humanitarian relief NGO that has long operated in Gaza (as well as other parts of the world.) The last time I interviewed Tjada D’Oyen McKenna was October 2022 when she had just returned from Somalia, which was then facing famine.
I kick off our conversation by asking her to put the Gaza crisis in context of other crises. We then discuss the complexity of getting even limited aid into Gaza.
This excerpt is edited for clarity. The full podcast interview is freely available across all podcast listening platforms.
Mark Leon Goldberg : The last time you and I spoke was September 2022 and you had just returned from Somalia which was on the brink of famine. Back then, the challenge to avert the famine was more or less to get people and policymakers to pay attention. This was a crisis that was off the radar of key donors like the United States and Europe. Now, here we are in January 2024, and the Gaza crisis is both getting a huge amount of attention and there is a catastrophic food crisis. How do you make sense of that?
Tjada D’Oyen McKenna This is a manmade conflict-driven hunger catastrophe that is veering toward famine while the world watches. And I think it’s difficult for the world to understand it because people have an image of famine in their mind — of a very dusty place, of a prolonged hunger situation where people are emaciated and have lost a lot of weight. That's not what this hunger catastrophe looks like because it is a sudden onset, rapid development. That’s what is truly shocking and I don't think we've done a good job of communicating this.
Right now, four out of five people facing famine globally, so about 700,000, are located in Gaza. The other thing that I think people don't understand is the dire conditions in which these people are suffering in terms of not having access to supplies, not being able to go anywhere for help. I think it's just hard to really imagine how someone's life could change that quickly, and how people could be on the edge of famine in this way.
Mark Leon Goldberg I have to imagine for humanitarian actors like Mercy Corps, the World Food Program and other international NGOs, you're used to food crises that do not look like this. Cindy McCain, the executive director of the World Food Program, said the other day, "We have people that are starving just a couple of miles from trucks filled with food that can't get in." In my 20 years of covering humanitarian crises, I just have not seen something like this.
Tjada D’Oyen McKenna When people think of conflicts, they don't think of a conflict that is happening under a siege. In Gaza, people are under constant threat from bombardment, they're under total siege. There's been complete telecommunications blackouts, no entrance of food or water. In other [famine-like] situations, people had places where they could flee. In Gaza, there is no safe zone at all and there is nowhere to escape to. So it's not a situation that people can just move to that area to get food, or they can go to a neighboring country. They just have no place to go from a place that's being truly cut off from everything.
Later, I asked her to explain the process by which limited aid reaches people inside Gaza.
Mark Leon Goldberg There is some aid getting in to Gaza. It's a trickle compared to the needs. But nonetheless, I'm really interested to learn from you the logistics of how is it that aid gets to Gaza? Where does it start and where does it end up? How does it go from point A to point B?
Tjada D’Oyen McKenna It is important to remember that before the war, just to get basic goods and services into Gaza, an average of 500 trucks would enter Gaza per day. Right now we have two main entry points: the Rafah crossing on the border in Egypt and another one through Israel [Kerem Shalom] for limited purposes. Right now, what we're seeing are thousands of commercial and humanitarian aid trucks lined up just across the border in Egypt, often for several weeks at a time, with an average of only 130 trucks making it through each day.
The process to allow these trucks to cross the border is lengthy and very bureaucratic. Even before this crisis, there has always been a list of items not allowed inside Gaza. That's known as the “dual use items list.” It’s a list that supposedly includes objects that could be repurposed into weapons.
However, they are now rejecting items that are not on that list. So what we have seen are trucks that have been carrying items like tents, sleeping bags and generators, which are essential items for people to survive in harsh winter conditions. They've been forced to turn back because some parts, like the metal tent poles, it's argued could be used for weapons. Even the metal zippers on zipper bags have been sent back. Each time there are items that are disqualified or rejected, that truck is then sent to the back of the line and then has to go through the whole thing again. This list of things that are rejected is not consistent and can be applied arbitrarily.
When a truck finally gets inside, the distribution process also faces huge obstacles. There is no deconfliction process in this conflict. Normally in situations like this, we have these mechanisms that humanitarian organizations rely on to make sure that we can safely deliver aid. Those don't exist. They are nonexistent or totally not functioning in this environment. So even once a truck finally gets inside, there are no consistent places where we can tell people to go to get regular distributions.
Full transcript is available immediately below the fold for paying subscribers.
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