Archive for the ‘starvation’ tag
Canadians and Pirates #
Every once in a while I like to see stories about high-seas piracy. I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t because of fictions of peglegs and eyepatchs.
In any case, the Canadians have stepped up and are providing a frigate for safe passage of much needed food shipments from the World Food Program through the pirate-infested waters and to the famine-stricken country.
Famine in Ethopia #
A sad fact I’d not heard before:
So it is across much of south and east Ethiopia. In the highlands the rain was erratic; in the lowlands it fell not at all. The result is that an extra 4.5m of Ethiopia’s 80m people need emergency food, on top of the 5m or so who already get it, according to the UN’s World Food Programme.
The government says a recovery is possible if the rains expected later in the year are good. Foreign aid specialists say that the food shortages are “going in the direction of high mortality”. The government is supposed to have 450,000 tonnes in a grain stockpile, with 100,000 tonnes in reserve to keep prices from rising too much. But it has only 65,000 tonnes left.
An Update from Myanmar #
I’ve been a little behind, but this week-old report on Burma from The Economist deserved sharing. A telling anecdote about the country’s problems:
Alarmingly, despite agricultural plenty, Myanmar has the classic conditions for a famine: acute poverty, poor or non-existent flows of information and crazy policies. In one cackhanded intervention in agriculture, the junta in 2006 ordered every farmer with an acre (0.4 hectares) of land to plant “physic nuts” (jatropha) around the edge of his plot. It was so keen on the crop that it also set up special plantations. The idea was to make biofuels to meet Myanmar’s energy shortage—even much of Yangon spends most evenings in darkness. But Myanmar lacks the refineries to turn the plants into fuel. The policy has been cited by many refugees pitching up at the Thai border as one reason for their flight: typically, the junta has been dragooning farmers into working for no pay in its jatropha plantations, so it becomes even harder to make a living.