East Africa faces 'world's worst food security crisis' (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

The world's worst food security crisis is continuing in the eastern Horn of Africa, a US agency has warned.

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (Fewsnet) said areas of particular concern were in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.

It said large-scale emergency assistance was urgently needed "to save lives and treat acute malnutrition" in the region.

It also stressed that the current humanitarian response was "inadequate".

In a statement, Fewsnet said the eastern Horn of Africa "has experienced two consecutive seasons of significantly below-average rainfall, resulting in one of the driest years since 1995".
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more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13691898

[Newest Reality]

1. Profit over people.

Live with it or fight against it.

Profit is like a god that really wants you to find the corresponding atheism to it before you and everything you love and value is destroyed by it.

Paradigm shifts are in order. Who will go there? Profit, politics, power, bankers, elite families and, ultimately: Hierarchy. Can we live as beings in direct relation to each other concerning survival, or do we continue on this more and more obvious path to self-destruction, individually and as a species?

Who knows, we could each decide by making changes, being our adaptable selves for a change, and finding options that may not have been obvious until we allowed for the idea of more extreme flexibility.

[piratefish08]

2. too busy spreading peace in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya......

and gearing up for South America......

[classysassy]

3. Bread,butter or bullets

The American criminals prefer bullets in order to kill and mail others instead of helping the needy.All of our evil deeds will come back and haunt this country because we refuse to look past the buck.

[pampango]

4. The UK is more likely to help than the US (assuming they can beat back their RWers)

THE NATIVIST tendency in British politics—already cross about membership of the International Monetary Fund (because IMF membership has left Britain guaranteeing a share of the bailout funds extended to troubled eurozone economies)—is now making a push against the overseas aid budget.

By the time the tabloids were finished, a scorecard showing Britain spending 0.56% of GDP on aid in 2010, ahead of France at 0.5%, Germany at 0.38% or America at 0.21% became "a damning report" revealing Britain's free-spending "while British taxpayers suffer through an age of austerity." The Daily Mail splashed on the story, and the Express and Sun also had a go. Angry Conservative MPs accused the government of having its priorities all wrong.

Instead, the Tories who attack DFID with the most vigour are often the same ones who want to see British defence spending preserved from cuts. Here is Peter Bone, a senior backbencher widely quoted today:

Where are the small state purists on the Tory right? I might not agree with them if I did meet them: in an alarmingly messy, globalised world I see a continuing need for spending on both aid and defence. (I even, blush, agree with the purely moral arguments for spending relatively small sums to save the lives of women in childbirth, vaccinate children, buy bed nets against malaria and so on). But at least spending hawks cross about wasted defence and aid spending would have the virtue of consistency.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/05/british_nativism

[FLPanhandle]

5. It's just the beginning

With climate change and over population, wait until a food crisis hits Europe or the US. There is no one to bail us out.