{"id":88802,"date":"2017-03-20T12:01:48","date_gmt":"2017-03-20T12:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=88802"},"modified":"2017-03-18T14:29:39","modified_gmt":"2017-03-18T14:29:39","slug":"facing-famine-20-million-people-need-food-not-bombs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/03\/facing-famine-20-million-people-need-food-not-bombs\/","title":{"rendered":"Facing Famine, 20 Million People Need Food, Not Bombs"},"content":{"rendered":"

16 Mar 2017 – <\/em>The world is facing the most serious humanitarian catastrophe since the end of World War II. Twenty million people are at risk of starving to death in Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria and South Sudan. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is responding by slamming the door on refugees and cutting aid funding while proposing a massive expansion of the U.S. military.<\/p>\n

\u201cMillions of people are barely surviving in the space between malnutrition and death, vulnerable to diseases and outbreaks, forced to kill their animals for food and eat the grain they saved for next year\u2019s seeds,\u201d Antonio Guterres, the new United Nations secretary-general, said recently. \u201cThese four crises are very different, but they have one thing in common. They are all preventable. They all stem from conflict, which we must do much more to prevent and resolve.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the United Nations scrambles to raise the $5.6 billion needed to avert the worst impacts of these crises, the Trump administration is slashing funding to the U.S. State Department, and, according to a draft executive order obtained by The New York Times, to the United Nations as well. The order as drafted (but not yet officially signed or released) calls for \u201cat least a 40 percent overall decrease\u201d of U.S. voluntary contributions to U.N. programs like the World Food Program, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and UNICEF. \u201cThis is, frankly, a juvenile attitude unbecoming of the world\u2019s only superpower,\u201d wrote former George W. Bush State Department official Stewart M. Patrick, now at the Council on Foreign Relations.<\/p>\n

While the attitude may be juvenile, its impact on actual juveniles is deadly. Seven million people in Yemen are in danger of starvation, and 2.2 million of those are children. Close to half a million of those children are \u201cseverely and acutely malnourished,\u201d which means they have already suffered potentially lifelong, developmental damage due to starvation.<\/p>\n

Joel Charny, director of the Norwegian Refugee Council USA, said on the \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d news hour, \u201cIf the war continues, people will die from famine. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any question about that. We just have to find a way for the war to end.\u201d That would start with stopping the arming of Saudi Arabia, which is mercilessly bombing Yemen. Instead, on Tuesday, President Trump met at the White House with Saudi Arabia\u2019s Deputy Crown Prince and Minister of Defense Mohammed bin Salman, where they reportedly discussed resuming sales of precision-guided munitions to the Saudi dictatorship.<\/p>\n

Amnesty International urged Trump to block new arms sales, writing, \u201cArming the Saudi Arabia and Bahrain governments risks complicity with war crimes, and doing so while simultaneously banning travel to the U.S. from Yemen would be even more unconscionable.\u201d<\/p>\n

The war in Yemen is largely seen as a proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with the United States, under Obama and now intensified under Trump, arming the Saudis and logistically supporting their bombardment of Yemen. \u201cIt needs to be stressed that this is not something that started on January 20th,\u201d Charny said, referring to Trump\u2019s inauguration. \u201cThis is something that the U.S. has been driving for some time.\u201d In his two terms, President Obama sold a record-breaking $115 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia, suspending sales only after a Saudi jet attacked a Yemeni funeral with back-to-back bombings, killing 140 people and wounding 500.<\/p>\n

Millions more face famine and a painful death by starvation in Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria. In South Sudan, despite oil revenue and fertile cropland, Charny says, \u201cunresolved political conflicts within the South Sudanese ruling class that date all the way back to the \u201990s, that were covered up during the independence struggle but have since emerged,\u201d leading to famine. In northeastern Nigeria, armed conflict between the group Boko Haram and the government make delivering humanitarian aid extremely dangerous. Somalia, where famine threatens populations that are actually reachable by the weak central government and aid agencies, Charny struck a more optimistic note: \u201cIf we\u2019re able to mobilize food and cash quickly, we can overcome the situation in Somalia … if we get moving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Famine in these four countries is avoidable. President Trump should fully fund food shipments \u2014 not arms shipments \u2014 and spearhead much-needed diplomacy to avoid the immense catastrophe of 20 million horrific deaths by starvation.<\/p>\n

This is what would make America great.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

16 Mar 2017 – The world is facing the most serious humanitarian catastrophe since the end of World War II. Twenty million people are at risk of starving to death in Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria and South Sudan. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is responding by slamming the door on refugees and cutting aid funding while proposing a massive expansion of the U.S. military.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}