254 - "All Skin and Bones:" War and Climate -Caused Famines on Our Watch, II
Sudan, Haiti, Central Africa
Not since the 1980s, when an immense drought resulted in a killing famine in the Horn of Africa, or perhaps not since the pre-Green Revolution crop failures in India in 1943 (and the huge famines under British rule in the 1870s), and Stalin's policy-induced great famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s, have so many persons across the globe been threatened with acute hunger. We wrote Monday in this space about the continuing tragedy in Gaza. But there are other places of equal risk, today, across our perishing and beleaguered globe. World order must do better. More lives need to be spared; children everywhere are especially at acute risk of starving.
Sudan
Sandy Gaza is 25 miles long and 11 miles wide. It once held more than 2 million people and perhaps 30,000 Hamas soldiers. Sudan also has lots of sand, but before fratricidal war consumed the country starting a year ago, it harbored 49 million people in an area larger than Alaska and about one-quarter the entire size of the United States. Now, thanks to a bitter internal shoot-out between the regular army and an irregular militia, 9 million children are starving, 8 million families have been displaced from their homes, 300,000 people have fled the country for refuge across nearby borders, and at least 15,000 civilians have been caught in crossfire and killed.
The civil war in Sudan is a contest to the end, it seems, between two men (and the forces that they command) who ruled Sudan together from 2019 after a joint military coup against their boss, armed forces head and presidential dictator Omar al-Bashir, a fugitive from an International Criminal Court Indictment. Last year his successors --General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who leads the regular Sudanese army, and Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemeti), leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) split, each wanting total control of Sudan's gold resources and petroleum revenues.
Thanks to backing from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Hemeti and his legions have had the upper hand, largely gaining control of Khartoum, the capital on the Nile River, and key cities nearby and to the south. Hemeti's men have also decimated Darfur Province in the far west, resuming a twenty-year old campaign to ethnic cleanse that province of Africans and gain land and animals for the Arab Sudanese legions of the RSF. Africans have fled across the border into Chad.
One of the results of these killing sprees has been acute food insecurity. Food cannot enter the cities easily from the countryside. Food supply lines are interrupted, harvests destroyed, new plantings prevented, and more dangers arriving daily. The World Food Program says that 25 million Sudanese are at risk of famine. Destruction has been continuous -- almost without end and without strategic purpose.
None of what is happening in Sudan makes sense or seems to accomplish material gains for the battling armies. Or for the UAE. The U. S. and Saudi Arabia have tried to intervene alongside local diplomatic forces in the Horn of Africa, but so far to no avail. Meanwhile, hunger grows and children, once again, are the key sufferers.
The Gazan near-famine is everywhere reported and critiqued. So should the atrocities and the starvation of children throughout desperate Sudan.
Haiti
Haiti is another war zone. Eighty powerful gangs, with three more prominent, have been battling against each other for territory and rights to plunder, extort, kidnap, and ransom throughout Port-au-Prince. This mayhem has been erupting at an increasing scale for a year or more, especially in the absence of any kind of governmental authority or police force that is powerful and unafraid. Nearly 7,000 Haitians have died this year and in 2023, victims of gruesome gang violence, burnings, and beheadings. Sexual assaults are common. About 360,000 have lost their homes and another 300,000 have fled the capital city either for safer towns along Haiti's southern arm or eighty miles north to Emperor Christophe's old fief in and around Cap Haitian.
The gangs have blocked the port of the capital through which most imports arrive, even seizing a ship carrying rice. They have frightened villagers sufficiently so that no produce is coming into the beleaguered city from rural areas. As a result, there is growing hunger. About 22 percent of all children in the city are malnourished. Starvation is near at hand. The gangs need forcibly and immediately to be contained.
That was supposed to be the task of a Kenyan-led police force. But there are no signs of the Kenyans, nor of the Caricom detachments that were to join those from Africa. A big country with tough soldiers needs to do the job before Haiti, already a collapsed state, sinks further into total misery.
Natural Calamities
Starvation caused by fighting can be reduced if the UN and major global powers intervene diplomatically or directly to curtail violent hostilities. But where climate change, the warming of the globe, massive snowfalls and ice damage, and the failure of customary rains have caused unremittent drought, relief efforts are essential. Mongolia and Central Africa need our helpful intervention immediately.
Mongolia
Mongolians are going hungry, but not because of war. The high desert country poised uncomfortably between Russia and China this winter experienced its worst weather since at least 2010 and received more snow than in any year since 1971. Snow fell and fell and fell, covering miles and miles of grazing land. Thanks to persistent freezing weather, as many as 6 million horses, camels, sheep, goats, and cattle have died already, and 60 million more are said to be at risk of starvation and death. Pastures have been covered with ice from one end of the Alaska-sized country to the other.
Mongolians are predominantly pastoralists; their export earnings and subsistence food supplies depend almost entirely on their vast herds of ruminants. Thus, if 80 or 90 percent of their flocks perish -- which could be a worst-case scenario-- so they themselves risk starvation as well as impoverishment. (In 2010, 25 percent of Mongolia's livestock perished.)
The worst is yet to come because the new grass will not spout until at least May, and many families, especially 7,000 reputedly already at acute risk, cannot survive that long without meat or income from their endangered livestock. As in other cases of near-famine, children are greatly endangered. Relief is required from an already burdened world.
Central Africa
The rains failed again (not for the first time in this century) throughout Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, putting at least 24 million people in danger. Even before drought was calamitous, at least a third of all Zimbabweans were already receiving food from the World Food Program. Now, with the usual March/April harvest producing very little of the maize (corn) that all Central Africans consume as their staple diet source, a major relief effort is required. And it will need to last until the next harvest season, a year from now.
These many millions in the four adjacent countries north of South Africa now face what Oxfam calls an "unimaginable humanitarian situation." All four countries have declared official national emergencies. From January into March, when maize cobs should have been completing their growth process, rainfall levels were the lowest in forty years. Large swaths of all four countries experienced the driest February in at least 100 years, according to USAID. For Malawi, a thin sliver of a country with 21 million people fully dependent on maize, cassava, and peanuts, it was the fourth consecutive year when the weather turned against its inhabitants. And Mozambique received a double whammy when drought in January and February was followed by a tropical cyclone in March and vast floods that inundated Maputo, the capital, and the surrounding region but came too late to retrieve a terrible harvest.
From Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, to Maputo, and on to Haiti, Sudan, and Gaza, millions face crippling food shortages unless global assistance arrives in the form of corn from the United States and Europe. But the wars also need to end, and rapidly.