U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon's plea: We can't allow Somalia to starve

[cory777]

Source: LA Times

Across the Horn of Africa, people are starving. A catastrophic combination of conflict, high food prices and drought has left more than 11 million people in desperate need. The United Nations has been sounding the alert for months. We have resisted using the "F-word" — famine — but on Wednesday, we officially recognized the fast-evolving reality. There is famine in parts of Somalia. And it is spreading.

This is a wake-up call we cannot ignore. Every day I hear the harrowing reports from our U.N. teams on the ground. Somali refugees, their cattle and goats dead from thirst, walking for weeks to find help in Kenya and Ethiopia. Children who arrive alone, terrified and malnourished, their parents dead, in a foreign land.

From within Somalia, we hear terrible stories of families who watched helplessly as their children died, one by one. One woman recently arrived at a U.N. displacement camp 87 miles southwest of Mogadishu after a three-week trek. Halima Omar, from the region of Lower Shabelle, was once considered well-off. Today, after three years of drought, she barely survives. Four of her six children are dead.

"There is nothing in the world worse than watching your own child die in front of your eyes because you cannot feed him," she said of her ordeal. "I am losing hope."

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-bankimoon-famine-somalia-20110722,0,4441611.story?track=rss

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Activist News http://activistnews.blogspot.com/

[earcandle]

1. Try calling it genocide by negligence... or just genocide and you will get more attention... cause

that is what this is...

And in this climate, "better thee than me" seems to
keep people from participating in making real change. 
Total abdication of responsibility... via survival
programming.  nice trick. evil trick.  thank you murdock, you
fuckhead.

[saras]

2. We're kind of late on this one - like a few decades...

The government fell apart decades ago, not long after drought forced many migratory cattle herders from the center of the country to move to the coast and harvest seafood.

The piracy started after first world fishing fleets entered their national waters and decimated their fisheries, and used their coastline as a toxic waste dump.

As far as I know, no one has any sort of plan to make Somalia anything like self-supporting. So, if they don't starve, either someone feeds them indefinitely or moves them to somewhere with a functioning economy.

[earcandle]

3. We reap what we sow... who will feed us?

[ChrisBorg]

4. The U.N. should deliver food to them. We can offer support. Oh...that's right

We tried that before...

[Kingofalldems]

5. Oh I get it--slick.

Bringing back the Clinton/Somalia thing.

[ChrisBorg]

6. I don't see that episode as much Clinton as Somalia.