UN Warning Amid Famine In Drought-Hit Somalia

Feelthelove wrote:

The Shebab rebels in Somalia expelled foreign aid groups two years ago, accusing them of being Western spies and Christian crusaders.

However, the group recently said it would lift restrictions on aid allowing the UN last week to airlift in supplies.

MrDoodles wrote:


they'd stop them breeding like flies,

Seren wrote:

A bit harsh...

It's a drought in the region.

You obviously have not contributed to the Appeal so why the hostility?

MrDoodles wrote:

Because I'm sick of our Governments giving OUR money away, when there are enough problems in this Country to fix 1st!

Seren wrote:

They give our money away quite liberally to those who chose not to work too.

Aren't they scroungers, oh and white too?

MrDoodles wrote:

Correct and I'm sick of that as well, but the LibLaCon created the "under-class" and only one Party will grasp the nettle over this as well and get the UK back to a place where it doesn't have over 10 Million people "Economically In-active"

MrDoodles wrote:

Because I'm sick of our Governments giving OUR money away, when there are enough problems in this Country to fix 1st!

Khadija Aliow Mohamed sits silently in the sand inside her tiny twig igloo, staring at the small bundle wrapped in a red and blue shawl on the bed. The 20-year-old Somali walked for 30 days with her two-year-old daughter Madina to get to this refugee camp in northern Kenya a few weeks ago.

Hungry and exhausted, the family escaped the worst drought in southern Somalia in decades, which has already claimed tens of thousands of lives, according to the United Nations. But while Mohamed regained her strength in Dadaab, the world's biggest refugee settlement, Madina did not. Just an hour after the UN declared a famine in two regions of Somalia, Madina died. Her mother, who is pregnant, is too shocked to talk.

Instead her grandfather, Ali Mohamed, explains what happened. Mohamed escaped Somalia with them, and carried Madina's body here along the sand road from the hospital at noon on Wednesday.

"The child never recovered from the malnutrition," he says, clutching a small blue slip of paper with the words "Permit for Burial".

"Madina died because of the drought."

She will not be the last. According to the UN, more than six out of every 10,000 people are dying of hunger every day in some parts of the Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions of Somalia, with more than half the children there suffering from acute malnutrition. This is far above the normal famine threshold of two deaths per 10,000 people a day, and 30% malnutrition levels, UN agencies say.

While there have been numerous disasters in the Horn of Africa over the past decade, it is the first time a famine has been declared in the region since 1992, when hundreds of thousands of Somalis starved to death, prompting an international peacekeeping intervention.

"Somalia is facing its worst food security crisis in the last 20 years," says Mark Bowden, the UN official in charge of humanitarian aid in Somalia. "This desperate situation requires urgent action to save lives."

Other countries in the region, in particular Ethiopia and Kenya, are also facing a crisis because of the failures of rains in pastoralist areas – the worst situation for 60 years in some places – as well as soaring food prices and longer term issues such as underdevelopment and high population growth. Across the Horn 11 million people require humanitarian assistance.

But it is Somalia, where the situation is even more complex, that has been hardest hit, with 3.7 million people, nearly half the population, requiring food aid. The country has lacked an effective government since before the famine of the early 1990s. Most of southern Somalia is controlled by the al-Shabab Islamist group, which has prevented most international aid organisations, including the World Food Programme, from operating in its areas two years ago, only lifting the ban last week.

This has meant that many people have received little or no help since the drought first started to bite last year. At the same time, prices of staple foods such as sorghum has increased more than threefold over a year, due to the conflict and lack of supply.

First the animals perished.

Ali Mohamed, the 63-year-old grandfather of the dead toddler Madina, says he lost his entire herd of 90 camels, goats and cows this year.

"There was no water, no grazing, no food production. We lost everything. This is the worst drought I've ever experienced."

Then people started to die of hunger-related diseases.

Over the past month the number of deaths has grown sharply, according to aid organisations, prompting an exodus from southern Somalia towards the capital Mogadishu, as well as across borders. Some 2,000 Somalis are crossing into Ethiopia a day, with a further 1,300 coming to Dadaab daily, according to Attidzah Fafa, head of the UNHCR office here. He says 30,000 people arrived in June alone, and he expects similar numbers in July and August.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/20/somalia-famine-refugee-camp

Seren wrote:

It's shameful that this is not front page news here in the UK.

Pope Benedict XVI has said persistent world hunger is a “tragedy” driven by selfish and profit-driven economic models, whose first victims are millions of children deprived of life or good health.

In responding to the crisis, international agencies should rediscover the value of the family farm, promoting the movement of young people back into rural areas, the Pope said in an address to participants in an annual conference on hunger organised by the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Meeting with the group at the Vatican, the Pope strongly emphasised the theme of economic justice that has figured prominently in his encyclicals and other writings. He noted that millions of men, women and children remain without adequate nourishment today.

“My thoughts turn toward the situation of millions of children, who are the first victims of this tragedy, condemned to an early death or to a delay in their physical or psychic development, or forced into forms of exploitation just to receive minimal nutrition,” he said.

The Pope said the cause of such hunger cannot be found only in technical developments such as production cycles or commodity prices.

“Poverty, underdevelopment and, therefore, hunger are often the result of selfish behaviours that, born in the human heart, manifest themselves in social life, economic exchange, in market conditions and in the lack of access to food,” the Pope said.

“How can we be silent about the fact that even food has become the object of speculation or is tied to the course of a financial market that, lacking definite rules and poor in moral principles, appears anchored to the sole objective of profit?” he said.

The Pope said the United Nations’ own studies showed that global food production was able to feed the world’s population – which made the situations of hunger all the more unjust.

The international community often limits its food assistance to emergency situations, he said. Instead, he told the experts, it needs to address the problem with long-term strategies that consider the human dimension of development and not just economic benefits.

The Pope called for support of international efforts to promote the family farm as a key component of national economies. The traditional nuclear family, he said, had shown itself to be a competent instrument for agricultural production and for training of new generations in farming.

“The rural family is a model not only of work, but of life and the concrete expression of solidarity, in which the essential role of the woman is confirmed,” he said.

The Pope said food security also required protective measures against “frenetic exploitation of natural resources”. This is especially true because the race to consumption and waste seems to ignore the threat to the genetic patrimony and biological diversity, which are so important to agricultural activity, he said.

He said the Bible’s injunction to “cultivate and care for the earth” was opposed to exclusive appropriation of such natural resources.

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2011/07/04/pope-selfish-economic-models-drive-world-hunger/