The devastating flooding that has hit 16 African countries as a result of a swathe of unprecedented rainstorms extending from Ghana in west Africa through to Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda has thrown up a major regional crisis. More than a million people have been made homeless. First and inevitably inaccurate estimates suggest scores of people have drowned. Most seriously, hundreds of thousands of acres of farm crops have been destroyed and water sources polluted. There is already evidence of cholera and other water-borne diseases breaking out.

What makes this disaster so complex is the sheer extent of the inundation. Individual governments are doing what they can. Ghana is seemingly the worst hit. Sudan has declared a state of emergency in the north of the country. The big question is how well the international community and its aid organizations can respond to urgent calls for food, shelter, medicines and transport. The task of bringing succor to an arc of ruin that crosses the entire African continent is a logistical nightmare. With floodwaters showing no immediate signs of subsiding and the strong likelihood of more rains, roads and bridges have been washed away and telecommunications shattered.

In the coming days there will need to be a major airlift to bring in urgently needed aid and personnel. Will the international community be able to respond? The United Nations World Food Program already admits the task is formidable. Nongovernmental aid organizations are going to be hard-pressed to expand and supplement existing aid programs. Much will depend on the ability of the UN to set in place rapidly a properly coordinated scheme to distribute help where it is most needed and then, just as importantly, to put in place follow-up assistance, to combat disease and help shattered communities rebuild at least the many dams that appear to have been washed away. There are also longer-term horrors feared. Scientists have warned that the deluge is likely to promote abnormal infestations of locusts which only three years ago brought serious devastation to agriculture in large parts of West and Central Africa. There are other particular tragedies. The damage in the already troubled Sudan is reported to be severe, with as many as half-a-million people made homeless. For some of the flood victims in Uganda the tragedy is particularly poignant since many families had only just returned to their homes in the wake of a putative peace deal between the government and the brutal rebel Lord’s Resistance Army.

What is required is an international aid effort on the same scale as that deployed to meet the 2004 Asian tsunami. But will the lessons taught by the muddle that followed that disaster really have been learned? This newspaper said then and has repeated since, that nothing short of permanent UN-coordinated emergency rescue forces, regionally based and able to support each other in dire emergency, will suffice. It is simply not good enough to leave the supply of urgent disaster aid to piecemeal efforts.