The Disaster Is Bigger Than Just U.S.

It is important to the country to reverse the trend toward increasing numbers reduced to poverty. It's important to the world as well. Does it seem to you that this used to be taken for granted, back before the advent of neocons as ideologues? With decreasing morality, the problems of poverty are multiplying.

Today I read an editorial that was placed only in my Sunday paper. I saw very few like it in other papers. It addressed tragic failures of the world, in letting its poor starve.

The cost of food is a matter of life and death for the poorest people in the world. The United Nations estimates that at least 14 million people in the Horn of Africa are in urgent need of food aid due to conflict, dramatic rises in food costs and severe drought. A region-wide humanitarian disaster may be looming.

Two countries most threatened by this crisis are Somalia and Ethiopia, where 2.6 million and 4.6 million people, respectively, face severe food shortages.
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Central to this is the relationship between food aid and food security. The World Food Program's $2.9 billion budget for 2008 was intended to cover the cost of feeding 80 million of the world's most food-insecure people, but the cost of delivering that food rose by $755 million in the first few months of this year.

Millions will fall into a deep cycle of destitution if the world does not act now.

Short term, oil-exporting countries, whose income has been significantly increased by high oil prices, have a responsibility to increase their aid; Saudi Arabia has already committed an additional $500 million. And immediate steps must be taken to reverse the export bans that have been placed on staple crops such as rice.

Longer term, governments of developing countries must reverse their longstanding neglect of the agricultural sector and put more resources into developing their own food production capacity. In addition, agricultural productivity must increase. The International Fund for Agricultural Development has estimated that 40 percent of Asian agricultural land is irrigated, compared with 4 percent in Africa.

The country we live in under horrendous leadership has turned its participation in the world into that of a detached aggressor. The results are tragic in many ways. Our failure to contribute to the prosperity of our own, and the world's, citizens is a major failure, and will reverberate in the form of reduced prosperity for everyone for some time to come.

Other papers with news of looming humanitarian disaster were in the UAE, Nepal, Turkey, etc. The NYT had another article yesterday, about political aims in promoting starvation in Darfur.

At the same time that starvation increases, Sudan is showing the ultimate inhumanity.

Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat.
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That leaves the United Nations and Western aid groups feeding more than three million Darfurians. But the lifeline is fraying. Security is deteriorating. Aid trucks are getting hijacked nearly every day and deliveries are being made less and less frequently. The result: less food and soaring malnutrition rates, particularly among children.

On top of this is the broader problem of trying to find affordable grains on the world market when prices are higher than they have been in decades. United Nations officials in Sudan say that the fact that they have to import some of the same commodities that Sudan not only produces but exports is a source of constant frustration.

The Sudan/U.S. connection is growing. We cannot continue to court China while watching Sudan starve its own people under the protective wing of their ally.

Worldwide, hunger grows while this government insists its christian values are expressed by pandering to business. Despite mounting, continuing proof that poverty and hunger are promoted by using government in service of industry against the public interest, the occupied White House betrays America and the world.