Somalian famine
 

I'm not at all sure the NZ forum can sustain the wider subjects but I'll give it a go for a week or so & some of yu others may like to try the same.. If it proves that the community can't debate, chat or even have the interest to talk about the issues raised , then I'll desist and even move the threads to The Lounge which is the wider BE and global community when all is said and done.

Somalia . Another shocking famine .

Some of you may not see what that has to do with New Zealand at all but we are still part of the rest of the world I would hope and NZ has taken in Somali refugees in the past.

Re: Somalian famine
 

Not really that shocking. In some ways quite foreseeable really :(.

Wikipedia has a good bit thingy explaining why Somalia is the way that it is and why it fell apart after the 60's. It's very sad really but the country has been destroyed by conflict with Islamic religious warlords.

It's rare to have international events where dealing with the consequences are easier than dealing with the causes but this may be just that situation.

Re: Somalian famine
 

It was very silly of Somalia to choose to have a food crisis, when there is a global financial crisis happening. Interesting word then, crisis, equally used to describe the inability to give your children enough food to sustain life and to describe the inability to have that new Porsche this year. Try again next year Somalia, when all these financial troubles have passed.

Re: Somalian famine
 

Shocking, sickening and sad, especially when we live in a world like this:

http://www.tristramstuart.co.uk/FoodWasteFacts.html

Having enough to eat is such a huge blessing we often take for granted.

Re: Somalian famine
 

But we have enough food because we don’t take those things for granted. We made artificial fertilizers to increase crop yields (40% of humans alive today owe their lives to the Haber-Bosch process), pesticides to kill the competition, diverted rivers to water the land and built aquifers so that we could irrigate even in hot dry summers. Then, because even that wasn’t enough of a guarantee, we built vast distribution networks for food stretching across the world.

Somalia’s food supply is subsistence agriculture, people putting seeds into the ground and hoping for the best. There is little hope of these advances in a country still suffering from a religious/civil war. Africa wouldn’t need us if they took the things that cost no money (secular government and legal systems, science, technology and engineering, etc.) because we in the western world are by no means exceptional :).

Re: Somalian famine
 

Sickening indeed, and you are so right. I am sure that the people in Somalia would love to have a debate about it before they die. 'We' should be ashamed of the fact that in this world of plenty children starve to death, and to somehow offset the blame onto the under-performance of their ancestors is equally sickening.