Despite drought warnings in the Horn of Africa, the international community was unprepared for what some experts say was "inevitable."
The refugee crisis in Kenya is not new--it has developed and grown significantly since the eruption of Somalia's civil war in 1991.
The humanitarian crisis at the Dadaab refugee complex in Kenya has recently attracted international attention, but some experts say it's "too little, too late."
NGO workers in Kenya, though grateful for the recent influx of aid dollars, are frustrated with the current state of chaos. They want to establish long-term development programs to avoid famines.
Hundreds of thousands of Somalis have fled their country to escape famine, but they are not finding significant improvement in living conditions when they arrive at the Dadaab complex.
The drought plaguing the horn of Africa has forced hundreds of thousands of Somalians to flee to Kenya where they have settled in makeshift camps near the Dadaab complex.
The international water shortage has created numerous challenges for populations in both rural and urban communities. In the slums of Nairobi, Kenya finding water and a solution falls disproportionately on women – especially young girls.
The risk posed by Ug99, a fungus that is deadly to the world's second largest crop, wheat, continues to rise on a global scale.
The landscape in this area east of Johannesburg, a slightly rolling plain with fields of tall corn, could almost pass for the American Midwest. Except for one feature - the giant yellowish mounds that are remnants of abandoned gold mines.
Fog shrouds the terraced hills, and a stream is swollen from the rain that fell overnight, but the damage of a drought that left 10 million Kenyans dependent on food aid is still evident. On many of the small farms, the ground is bare at a time when corn crops should be several feet tall.
"We had no maize because we planted and there was no rain," said Victor Mutua, who feeds an extended family of 15 from his 20-acre plot.
In Iowa, corn is king. In eastern and southern Africa, it's more important than that.
Americans feed corn to livestock or turn it into motor fuel or a sweetener for soft drinks. Africans eat it. Every day, sometimes more than once.
There's nothing like rain to wreck the field trial of a crop designed to resist drought. So an arid plain south of Nairobi is considered a good place to test drought-resistant biotech corn seeds: It doesn't rain for six months at a time.
Those long dry periods allow scientists to test the crop by stopping irrigation during critical periods, such as when plants flower.
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