Somalis starve to death

Catastrophic famine in Somalia has killed tens of thousands of people over the past month and sent hundreds of thousands on a death march in search of aid. Starving Somalis have walked more than 100 miles in blistering heat, many carrying dying children with distended bellies, to get to overcrowded refugee camps in Kenya. Untold numbers of women and girls have been raped along the way or in the camps. Still more Somalis, though, can’t flee the famine, because al-Shabab, the Islamist group that holds sway in the south, is blocking them from leaving and refusing to let aid groups enter. “There has been a catastrophic breakdown of the world’s collective responsibility,” said the charity Oxfam. “The warning signs have been seen for months, and the world has been slow to act.”

The media have ignored these desperate souls, said Uri Friedman in TheAtlantic.com. Drought has been killing livestock and crops in East Africa for months, and aid agencies were warning of the coming famine, but news coverage focused on “stories like the U.S. debt-ceiling debate, the U.K. phone-hacking scandal, and the Norway shooting.” The result is that half a million children are “on the brink of starvation,” while relief organizations plead in vain for money to help them.

Options are limited, said The Washington Post in an editorial. Al-Shabab, which is allied with al Qaida, has waged “perpetual war” against peacekeepers and aid workers alike. “Probably only an international military intervention could prevent mass starvation”—but the U.S. tried that during the last famine, in 1992, only to suffer “casualties it was unwilling to accept,” when the bodies of Marines were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Failing military action, the U.S. can only loosen restrictions against al-Shabab, a designated terrorist group, and hope that the Islamists accept humanitarian aid.

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Starving people need better aid, not just more aid, said Alexander Gaus and Julia Steets in Foreign Policy. The current system relies on donor countries to give their surplus wheat or rice, grains that are convenient to transport but not very nutritious. The U.S. and the EU will have to rewrite the Food Aid Convention to encourage donations of enriched food and cash. “What donors supply should depend on the needs on the ground, not what’s in stock.”