famine
stoat | October 19, 2011 Never blog when pissed [*] they said...
So, Kloor and Romm are having a dust up over stuff, and if you care you can read the details or even take sides (I'm with Kloor, you won't be surprised to learn). But we can take a step back and consider a more generalised problem, in the context of Doctors Warn Climate Change is "Greatest Threat to Public Health": suppose we care about famine in the third world (in the sense of wanting to do something about it, rather than in the sense of finding it interesting material to blog about it): what might we do?
* stop climate change (reduce impacts)
*…
lborkowski | October 17, 2011The kidnapping of two aid workers from the Dadaab refugee camp on the Kenya-Somalia border is a grim reminder of the crisis situation in the region, especially Somalia. Al-Jazeera's Peter Greste has some numbers:
[I]n Somalia alone, four million people are still starving nationwide; three million of those live in the South. Of these, 750,000 people risk death in the next four months if they do not get aid immediately.
According to the United Nations agency responsible for monitoring food supplies in Somalia, almost half a million children are suffering from "severe acute malnutrition". About…
lborkowski | July 28, 2011Months of a severe drought in East Africa have led to famine in two regions in Southern Somalia. According to the UN's definition, famines can only be declared under the following conditions:
At least 20 per cent of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited ability to cope; acute malnutrition rates exceed 30 per cent; and the death rate exceeds two persons per day per 10,000 persons.
These horrific conditions exist in Somalia's Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions. Much of the rest of the country, as well as neighboring parts of Ethiopia and Kenya, are experiencing food…