Venutra County Star
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
by Terry Defarge
The international news warns that Somalia again faces starvation, this despite last year's famine only recently being declared over. While mothers hold healthy infants kept alive by supplies from outside, the U.N. spokesman cautions that their situation is unsustainable. This year's harvest is already doomed by returning drought and war. He fears the world's compassion will tire. He offers no solution.
What he doesn't say but is obvious is that climate change will produce increased desertification with famine more years than not, not just in Somalia. Further, many relief supplying countries suffer the same climate irregularities, our own great plains, for example, where stubborn drought strikes down both grain production and livestock dependent on feed and pasture.
Arguably all wars are at base resource wars, regardless of the rhetorical cover given them or the resource desired. Somalia's situation shows the land will no longer feed the people most of the time and begs for a merciful and voluntary solution to the shortfall, rather than war and starvation.
We have rational and effective means of voluntarily limiting population through contraception, and this solution applies not just to East Africa but globally. Our human population is well into overshoot, yet the same economic and political forces that prevent our facing the reality of climate change also stand in the way of a population policy and access to the means.
Without a large dollop of rationality soon, Somalia will be everyone's future.
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Ventura