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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Mon Aug 29 2011 - 08:08:22 EDT
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/08/29/kennealy.drought.famine/
Drought not the real cause of East Africa famine
By Thomas Keneally,
Special to CNNAugust 29, 2011 7:00 a.m. EDT
Author Thomas Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 for Schindler's
Ark, later made into the film Schindler's List. His latest book Three
Famines examines three historical famines and their causes.
(CNN) -- Imagine if long-term drought were to strike a part of the
rural United States, Wyoming say, or Montana.
There would be bank foreclosures as the price of cattle would fall
because there was too many of them on the market, families would
tragically lose their farms, and grocery lists would be trimmed.
But would people starve, actually waste away until their bodies began
to devour themselves?
In Southern Somalia, Djibouti, parts of Ethiopia and in refugee camps
in Kenya at the moment, up to 12 million people, basically half a
Canada, are facing death.
In Somalia, the people already in crisis number about four million.
Mothers, for example, are again making the Sophie's choice of how to
share the small resources of remaining food amongst their children.
And the tired old terms to explain it all are again repeated. The
cause, we are told, is drought. The "caused by drought" formula is not
only lazy journalism. We've heard that song sung so often in the past
that it may now make us immune to the famine's claim on us.
Certainly, drought is a trigger of famine. And global warming might be
extending the length of droughts. But Amartya Sen, the Nobel
Prize-winning economist famously said that no substantial famine has
ever occurred in a liberal democracy. I believe Sen is right.
Famines occur in places where people are tyrannized over either by
governments or, in the case of Southern Somalia, by private armies and
militias.
--Thomas Keneally
Famines occur in places where people are tyrannized over either by
governments or, in the case of Southern Somalia, by private armies and
militias. They occur in places where even in the lead-up years to
famine, farmers are not always able to plant crops with security,
without the likelihood that they might be confiscated, or that the
village granary will be burned by armies, private and government.
Famines, above all, occur in places where people get by on a few food
items. Though in the cities, including Mogadishu, Somalia, people
might eat canned food and a range of other food, for farmers in East
Africa, the normal foods are lentils and the bread made out of dhurra,
millet or a grain named teff.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta visits refugee camp If the grain crop is destroyed by
drought or locusts or undue human intervention, there goes the chief
nourishment.
The coastal fishermen of Somalia are themselves reduced in what they
can eat because the price of grain is escalating out of their reach.
The semi-nomadic people who own cattle have a diet of milk and meat.
The livestock die for lack of pasture, are stolen or have to be sold
or eaten, and there goes life.
In liberal democracies, as much under pressure as they might be at the
moment, if one food source is removed from us, we have the ability to
turn to another. Not so for the 12 million the U.N. has declared in
immediate peril of starving.
Why are people on Earth now, in the 21st century, still surviving on
one staple -- just as the Irish did with the potato in the 1840s?
--Thomas Keneally
RELATED TOPICS
Somalia
Food Security and Hunger
Ethiopia
So the question arises: Why are people on Earth now, in the 21st
century, still surviving on one staple -- just as the Irish did with
the potato in the 1840s?
Governments maintain unjust systems of land tenure, that is one
reason. Governments put money into arms instead of into infrastructure
-- into roads, for example, by which aid can easily transported, or
into storage facilities.
One is entitled to ask why, after all the development and emergency
aid spent on Ethiopia, there is a food crisis there every time there
is a drought? Is this a failure of rain or a failure of government?
We see the above-mentioned "undue human intervention" in East African
people's welfare in the fact that in the case of Southern Somalia, the
Obama administration has had to give aid agencies a guarantee of
freedom from prosecution even if some of the aid has to be given,
virtually as a protection bribe, to the fundamentalist military group
called Al Shabaab.
Al Shabaab has preyed on the Southern Somalis year after year.
Charities must pledge their best efforts to prevent Al Shabaab from
hoarding food and charging tax on it.
These realities of famine are as much, if not more, the cause of
famine than natural disaster. In some cases it is misgovernment, and
in the case of Somalia it is warlord-ism.
The question arises, should this reality stop us from coming to the
aid of our fellow world citizens in East Africa? In my opinion it
makes it more urgent.
As the old aid song from the 1980s goes, "We are the world." In the
meantime we'll only learn to understand and address this deadly
phenomenon if we stop citing "caused by drought" every time something
like this calamity comes to our notice.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Thomas Keneally.
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