1 Billion is a very big number. The human population of the world didn't reach the 1 billion milestone until the year 1804.
Now, for the first time in human history, we've reached another 1 billion milestone. That's the number of humans going to bed hungry tonight.
A record 1 billion people worldwide are hungry and a new report says the number will increase if governments do not spend more on agriculture. According to the U.N. food agency, which issued the report, 30 countries now require emergency aid, including 20 in Africa.
"It's actually a world emergency that calls for action from both developing and developed countries," said Otive Igbuzor, the head of international campaigns for ActionAid International.
"We know a child dies every six seconds of malnutrition," he said.
As is typical over the past several centuries, Africa dominates the group of countries stricken with famine, and nowhere is this more true than the Horn of Africa.
At the center of this humanitarian crisis is the failed-state of Somalia, now undergoing its worst famine since 1991.
Drought, conflict and displacement are causing the worst humanitarian crisis in war-torn Somalia in 18 years, the UN food agency warned on Monday.
Some 3.6 million people, about half the Somali population, need emergency aid including 1.3 million people displaced by fighting in the Horn of Africa country, the Food and Agriculture Organisation said in a statement.
"May God help us cos the world won't."
"Of all the situations in Somalia, today is the worst. There is no food, no medicine, no education, no jobs, no hope. People are dying every day. It is a slow genocide. We are hopeless now. Hopeless."
- Dr Hawa Abdi, Médecins Sans Frontières
Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Sudan have nothing on Somalia when it comes to suffering. Somalia has the largest refugee crisis in the world.
The largest concentration of refugees anywhere in the world lies about 15 kilometers outside of Mogadishu, where 200,000 people live in the most squalid of conditions. The largest refugee camp in the world lies just across the Kenyan border.
Yet most of the rest of the world pretends that nothing has significantly changed there. Aid to the region is only a tiny fraction of the amount of aid going to the Darfur refugees.
As for aid from America, that has been halted. The reason is because the Obama Administration is afraid, I kid you not, that some of the food and medicine might reach terrorists.
One in five Somali children is wasting away from malnutrition. Tens of thousands need urgent medical care to survive. The whole middle belt of the country is teetering on the brink of famine.
But right now that help is being delayed, they say, at least partly because the American government is worried that its aid is going to feed terrorists.
...
Few aid officials believe that the American government will actually shut off the spigot of life-saving assistance to Somalia when a punishing drought is sweeping across the region. But at least $50 million in American aid has been delayed as talks continue, United Nations officials said. Meanwhile, there is only enough emergency food to last Somalia four more weeks, they said.
It is immoral and inexcusable to allow hundreds of thousands of people to starve to death because a couple people that we've labeled terrorists might get some of the food and medicine. It's a monstrous policy that even right-wing Republicans would be ashamed to have their names attached to.
When I say "a couple terrorists" I mean it. Consider the situation in Somalia shortly before America directed and funded the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, an invasion that killed thousands of people and made hundreds of thousands refugees.
Less than two weeks before the invasion, mid-December 2006, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer publicly declared that "The Council of Islamic Courts is now controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals, east Africa al-Qaeda cell individuals." The claim was dubious and the Assistant Secretary of State provided no evidence. Horn of Africa specialist Ken Menkhaus notes that the Islamic Courts "movement as a whole was far from an al-Qaeda front. Only three foreign al-Qaeda operatives were said by the US to be in hiding in Mogadishu, a number far lower than those suspected of residing in neighboring Kenya."
"What is certain is that we have taken a group of the world's most destitute, desperate, and brutalized people, and brutalized them some more."
- Matthew Blood
However, let's set aside that for a moment and make the leap of faith that feeding three al-Qaeda terrorists is a real concern that justifies this policy.
If the Obama Administration really is concerned about some food and medicine making it to terrorists, then please explain this.
The United States has pumped at least 40 tonnes of weapons into Somalia in recent months to help the government fight the Islamic warriors who are linked to al-Qaeda. But the Somali army is so weak and ill-trained that its soldiers have begun defecting to the Islamists and their U.S.-supplied weapons are being traded to the insurgents, known as al-Shabab, the politicians say.
"The weapons have ended up mainly in the hands of al-Shabab," said Awad Ahmed Ashareh, a member of Somalia's official parliament and a Canadian citizen.
Washington's attempt to prop up the Somali government with a flow of arms is a futile gesture because there is not enough training and support for its soldiers, the politicians said in interviews in Nairobi, where many have sought shelter because Mogadishu is considered too dangerous.
So let's sum this up: we won't send aid to Somalia to save hundreds of thousands of innocent people from dying because a fraction of that food and medicine might wind up in the hands of terrorists.
But we will send 40 tonnes of weapons to Somalia to fight a civil war, when we KNOW for certain that the weapons are going to wind up in the hands of terrorists. What pathetic apologist is going to try to defend this monstrous foreign policy?
The fact that even the so-called Somalian government, that was installed with Ethiopian troops and American funding, doesn't live in Somalia because it is too dangerous speaks volumes about the failure of our policy. Currently the so-called Somalian government controls just a few neighborhoods of Mogadishu out of all of Somalia, and they only control that because the African Union peacekeepers enforce it.
Some out there justify this cold-blooded policy towards Somalia because a small number of Somalians are pirating in the waters of the Indian Ocean. How denying food to starving people would solve this situation or justify this policy is illogical.
But once again, let's ignore that for a moment and make the leap of faith that the woman and children of Somalia deserve to slowly die of famine because a small number of their tribe have resorted to being pirates.
Given that assumption, please explain this.
Pirates operating off the coast of Somalia are being controlled by crime syndicates, including foreigners lured by the multi-million-dollar ransoms, Interpol and other officials said on Wednesday.
"It is organized crime," said Jean-Michel Louboutin, executive director of police services at Interpol, the France-based global police organization.
"Certainly, yes," he told AFP when asked if people from outside Somalia were involved in the racket.
Only a small fraction of the ransom money that Somali pirates are getting is actually going to the guys on the boats. Most of that money is being directed overseas where international criminal organizations are collecting the rewards.
To put it another way, the starving and desperate Somalians are being exploited by foreigners yet again. Only this time they actually get a tiny sliver of the money from the crime bosses so they can feed their families, while American foreign policy would allow them to starve.
Is this a reason to hate the Somalian people?
"What you are seeing is a general indifference to a disaster that we played a role in creating."
- U.S. Representative Howard Wolpe