Cameroon's Capital City & Port Paralyzed By Food Rioting & Strikes - Reuters

[hatrack]

YAOUNDE, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Anti-government riots paralysed Cameroon's capital and main port city on Wednesday as popular anger exploded over high fuel and food prices and a bid by President Paul Biya to extend his 25-year rule.

The unrest -- the worst in more than 15 years in the central African oil producer -- has killed at least six people since it broke out at the weekend in the port of Douala, a major shipping hub on Africa's west coast. It spread on Wednesday to the inland capital Yaounde after sweeping through western towns in the last four days.

Riot police fired teargas at protesters in both cities, sometimes using helicopters to drop gas canisters from the air. State radio appealed for calm, saying the government had agreed with union leaders to make small cuts in gasoline and fuel prices, one of the key demands of the protesters. But people expressed outrage at the small size of the reductions.

In Yaounde, bands of stone-throwing youths blocked streets with barricades of burning tyres and timber. Businesses and shops closed and parents rushed to fetch their children from schools. Some vehicles left in streets were smashed and torched.

EDIT

http://www.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUSL27420545._CH_.2400

[ben_meyers]

1. Probably set off a wave of emigration, not unlike

The Irish Potato Famine in 1845. 750,000 died and 2,000,000 emigrated, many the the US, My wifes side of the family traces back to this event.

During the summer of 1845, a "blight of unusual character" devastated Ireland's potato crop, the basic staple in the Irish diet. A few days after potatoes were dug from the ground, they began to turn into a slimy, decaying, blackish "mass of rottenness." Expert panels convened to investigate the blight's cause suggested that it was the result of "static electricity" or the smoke that billowed from railroad locomotives or the "mortiferous vapours" rising from underground volcanoes. In fact, the cause was a fungus that had traveled from Mexico to Ireland.

"Famine fever"--cholera, dysentery, scurvy, typhus, and infestations of lice--soon spread through the Irish countryside. Observers reported seeing children crying with pain and looking "like skeletons, their features sharpened with hunger and their limbs wasted, so that there was little left but bones." Masses of bodies were buried without coffins, a few inches below the soil.

Over the next ten years, more than 750,000 Irish died and another 2 million left their homeland for Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. Within five years, the Irish population was reduced by a quarter.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/irish_potato_famine.cfm

[phantom power]

2. But where would they go? The world is a lot fuller than it was in 1845.

[ben_meyers]

3. Good question.

But if you read some of the literature from that time period many Irish really didn't know where the were going to go either. The "developed" world was relatively small in the 1800's also.

I'm not saying it's a good thing, and maybe the human population will contract again. It has before.

It's possible that the living really will envy the dead someday.