War of the famine in Somalia

NY Times:

The global food crisis has arrived at Safia Ali’s hut.

She cannot afford rice or wheat or powdered milk anymore.

At the same time, a drought has decimated her family’s herd of goats, turning their sole livelihood into a pile of bleached bones and papery skin.

The result is that Ms. Safia, a 25-year-old mother of five, has not eaten in a week. Her 1-year-old son is starving too, an adorable, listless boy who doesn’t even respond to a pinch.

Somalia — and much of the volatile Horn of Africa, for that matter — was about the last place on earth that needed a food crisis. Even before commodity prices started shooting up around the globe, civil war, displacement and imperiled aid operations had pushed many people here to the brink of famine.

But now with food costs spiraling out of reach and the livestock that people live off of dropping dead in the sand, villagers across this sun-blasted landscape say hundreds of people are dying of hunger and thirst.

This is what happens, economists say, when the global food crisis meets local chaos.

“We’re really in the perfect storm,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia economist and top United Nations adviser, who recently visited neighboring Kenya.

...

This story shows a ignorance of warfare in Somalia. It is the same ignorance that fueled our attempts to feed these people in the early 90s. The tribes of Somalia use famine as a weapon of war and deliberate create circumstances where famine will occur so they can wipe out their enemy on the cheap. It is a slow genocide similar to the one Stalin used in the Ukraine.

It is a serious mistake to consider these famines a by product of the civil war on Somalia. It is part of the strategy of one or both of the warring factions. That is why attempts to feed the starving is considered an act of war. That is how we got to "Blackhawk Down." What the world "food crisis" has done is just make this aspect of the war easier.

If the NGOs and the others who want to save these people do not comprehend this fact they will blunder into another war. If they are going to try to feed these people they should be prepared to make war against the side responsible for the man made famine. Otherwise they will find their shipments stolen and their people under attack again.

Richard Shultz and Andrea Dew discuss the tribal strategies in their book Insurgents, Terrorists and Militias.