.....HUMANKIND NEEDS CHAGE OF MIND, HEART AND SPIRIT..... ...TO ELIMINATE SUFFERINGS OF FAMINE IN THESE DAYS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE-BASED ADVANCEMENT....  .....which empowers humans to do endeavors today that were thought of Devine Nature 5 Centuries ago.... Photos gallery Photos: Famines in the Horn of Africa over the decades Please study the photo gallery and two video to empower yourself to understand the essence of famine and famine imposed suffering on humans and their families and communities and compare to what you have with your family in your community as a blessing of your lifestyle choices.... And then if this Life-Knowledge creates in your and your family and your community awakening and inspiration ....then empower your awakening and inspiration with the news/knowledge sharing article on the next web page.... Then with your knowledge based awakening strengthened by the milk of human kindness that is in inherent and intrinsic in every human being.... you could and should endeavour your best as humankind-service to change this continual suffering in some parts of the world.... The change you could and should endeavour to bring about is not stopping the famine at its root cause in the first instance but the human causes of selfish life-ideology, personal and collective greed for wealth and power of a minority in a community, and the commercial greed  which is usually envy-based of age-old human colonialism which still exists in all humanity in a modern form to a differing degree regardless of the "developed" status achieved.....and which cause conflicts and wars of unfair and unjust possession of material wealth and commerce thereof founded on self-centered lifestyle beliefs and choices of all human body, mind, heart, spirit and soul.... And then there is the human knowledge-engineered solutions to make arid and famine prone lands arable and livable and as wealthy as all other naturally habitable lands as shown in many nations on this Planet Earth through the collective endeavors of United Nations under its founding mandate.... And in both these endeavors if you, your family and your community could and should remember that Nature in the form of Earth and Cosmos kindly and involuntarily give human beings sustenance without charging anything and regardless of the diversity of human race and its lifestyle and lifestyle choices.....   (The above was contributed with a prayer for a happier tomorrow for all those who are suffering in places such as Somalia, North Korea and others fellow life-travelers in many nations mentioned in the article on the next web page by Champaklal Dajibhai Mistry of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada...simply that a little more life-sciences knowledge has been obtained here by all of humankind.....)  Please click on the next line to continue to get life-knowledge to bring the above prayer to reality of happiness in the entire humankind  with special urgency for those who are suffering in days to come.....

.....AND NOW CONTIUE YOUR LIFE-KNOWLEDGE SEARCH .....FOR ALLEVIATING HUMAN SUFFERING THAT CAN BE EASILY ELIMINATED..... .....by the sharing of Thomas Keneally's mind, heart and spirit....   PRIOR TO READING THE THOMAS KENNALLY SHARING.... please understand the ......2011 EAST AFRICA DRAUGHT..... summarized below which forms the basis for Somalia Famine story.... The FEWS Net projection for crisis levels in East Africa from July to September, based on current levels of response Country Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and neighboring countries Location Catastrophe-level in southern Somalia; emergency-level and crisis-level across the entire Horn of Africa region Period July 2011 – Total deaths Estimated over 29,000 for children under-5 in Somalia Death rate Up to 7.4 per 10,000 per day; up to 15.3 per 10,000 per day for children under-5 Theory Severe drought; lack of humanitarian aid; insurgency Relief $2.48 billion requested; $1.12 billion committed Impact on demographics More than 12.4 million affected, including 3.7 million in Somalia, 3.5 million in Kenya and 4.6 million in Ethiopia A severe drought is affecting the entire East Africa region. Said to be "the worst in 60 years", the drought has caused a severe food crisis across Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya that threatens the livelihood of more than 12 million people. Many refugees from southern Somalia have fled to neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia, where crowded, unsanitary conditions together with severe malnutrition have led to a large number of deaths. Other countries in and around the Horn of Africa, including Djibouti, Sudan, South Sudan and parts of Uganda, are also affected by a food crisis........On 20 July, the United Nations officially declared famine in two regions of southern Somalia, the first time a famine has been declared by the UN in nearly thirty years. Tens of thousands of people are believed to have died in southern Somalia before famine was declared.  On 3 August, the UN declared famine in three other regions of southern Somalia, citing worsening conditions and inadequate humanitarian response. Famine was expected to spread across all regions of the south in the following four to six weeks. The UN has conducted several airlifts of supplies in addition to on-the-ground assistance, but humanitarian response to the crisis has been hindered by a severe lack of funding for international aid coupled with security issues in the region......If the expected rains of March 2012 are good, there is a possibility of full recovery by July or August of 2012. Long-term strategies by national governments in conjunction with development agencies are believed to offer the most sustainable results.......YOU CAN HELP YOURSELF TO THE ENTIRE OVERVIEW KNOLWEDGE BASE ON THIS TOPIC BY CLICKING HERE...   ......WITH THE ABOVE STARTER KNOWLEDGE BASE..... now continue enjoying today knowledge sharing of Somalia's on-going political turmoil followed by Thomas Keneally's first of the 5 part series on what, how, when and why of famines in present day world.....   ......The politics of hunger, part one....focusing on Somalia Famine ....The first part of a week-long look at the crisis in the Horn of Africa ... Location map of Somalia Current Political Divisions in Somali.... Read up Politics of Somlia following the following overveiw...This will help you to understand the Somalia Famine news story of today.... The politics of Somalia are defined by the state of civil war which, since 1991, has divided the country. What started out as various warring entities and autonomist and secessionist regions fighting for control developed into a fragile government fighting an Islamic insurgency. In 1991, Mohammed Siad Barre fell. There was no permanent government until 2004. In 2004, a transitional federal government was formed. This had a 5-year mandate. The transitional federal assembly has 275-seats that has members chosen from various clans. There are 18 administrative regions. Somalia is full of different political parties. Due to the transitional government the political parties make no affect on it. At the beginning of 2007 Somalia was consolidating under the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which recently completed a military campaign against the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). The Islamic Courts Union is now part of the TFG, along with the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia The TFG is supported by the United Nations. Until recently, it governed out of an administrative capital in Baidoa. In the last days of 2006, forces of the transitional government supported by Ethiopian forces ousted the ICU from Mogadishu. Peace keeping forces from the African Union are expected to support the transitional government in its bid to control the country. During the war against the ICU, the autonomous states of Puntland and Galmudug had closely aligned themselves with the TFG and the supporting Ethiopian forces, while other former administrations such as Southwestern Somalia, Hiraanland and the Juba Valley Alliance fully integrated themselves with the TFG. Somalia became a united independent state on 1 July 1960 upon the merger of British Somaliland, which had become independent from the British five days earlier on 26 June 1960 and Italian Somaliland, which became independent from the Italian-administered United Nations trusteeship on 1 July to form the Somali Republic. The territory that was once British Somaliland is the area that now forms Somaliland. ......War and corruption are responsible for famines and not droughts..... .......“no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”..... -  1998 Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr.Amartya Sen, BA, PhD   (From:  Canadian Globe and Mail:  September 04, 2011: Thomas Keneally) Thomas Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist, playwright and author of non-fiction . He is best known for writing Schindler's Ark, the Booker Prize winning novel of 1982 which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. The book would later be adapted to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture......click here for full knowing of Thomas Keneally to understand his writings and today's news/knowledge sharing of human/life  fundamentals.... I have never quite believed that simplistic formula invoked in so many modern  famines: “caused by a severe drought.” Not that there isn't a severe drought now in southern Somalia, neighbouring Ethiopia and parts of Kenya.. There undeniably is. Last October to December, rains did not appear at all in the area. The March-April rains this year were late. My skepticism arises, though, because I come from perhaps the driest continent on Earth/a>, which has suffered recurrent droughts from earliest settler experience, including the El Nino-influenced drought that seemed to run nearly non-stop from the early 1990s to last year. Many of our farmers were forced off land their families had held for generations. Race for food in famine-ravaged Somalia There has always been drought-induced anguish in the Australian bush. But no one starves. Malnutrition, undeniably, and particularly in indigenous communities, but no famine. How is it the citizens of drought-stricken homelands in Somalia and the “triangle of death” (an area straddling Somalia, Ethiopia and northern Kenya has been dubbed "the triangle of death." among the many national conflict-war-torn areas also defined as "triangle of death") have none of the guarantees my drought-stricken compatriots have? It's because, as the famed aphorism of Nobel Prize/a>-winning economist Amartya Sen (the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members) puts it, “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in` a functioning democracy.” Similarly, an Irish friend of mine, a respected historian of famine named Cormac Ó Gráda, writes, “Agency is more important than a food-production shortfall. Mars counts for more than Malthus.” In contrast to Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, the 19th-century population theorist who blamed overpopulation and land overuse for the Irish famine, Mr. Ó Gráda sees war and other human actions as the engines of famine. His point is evident in the Horn of Africa now. One of the affected areas of Ethiopia is, for example, the Ogaden, whose people consider themselves kinsman of the Somalis and are similarly Muslim. It is in their territory that conflict between the Ethiopian army and Somali rebels has occurred over recent years, with many savageries and violation. The central regime in Addis Ababa has never felt kindly or acted tenderly toward the Ogadenians anyhow, nor given them a decent share of roads or clinics or schools. Is it a priority now to feed and care for them? All famines share common qualities, a similar DNA, that reduce acts of God like drought from real causes to mere tipping or triggering mechanisms. Famines often occur where farming and grazing are suddenly disrupted to fit some ideological plan of the leaders of the country, as in Mao's Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, Ethiopia in the 1980s with 1984–1985 famine and North Korea repeated famines since the mid-1990s. Famines also strike in areas where people live in hunger and malnutrition year after year. Malnutrition is a sensitivity-numbing word – it does not capture the swollen joints, flaking skin, retarded growth, porous and fragile bone, diminished height, lethargy and disabling confusion of soul that characterize it. As it's been said, a malnourished child can still howl out; a starving one has no strength to. As many as 60 per cent of North Korean children aged six months to seven years were malnourished in 2010, so they were set up to become the victims of famine over the past year. Once again, ideology and military priorities offer a better explanation than mere food shortage: The regime's re-evaluation of its currency wiped out the spending power of families, all to sustain itself and its army. Similarly, southern Somalia, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, had the highest level of child malnutrition on Earth in July this year. A few unlucky factors, and malnutrition becomes famine. People in that rural hinterland already lived off only a few food staples. Among some pastoral people who survive by livestock holdings, death of animals by June this year was reaching 60 per cent. The value of a cow relative to how much grain a family could buy with it had fallen by two-thirds. Grain and lentils are what farmers live off there. As with the Irish and their buttermilk and potatoes long ago, the East African diet is balanced on a two-legged stool. Still, if drought were the cause, we could just help them until the rains returned. But it's the helping that is complicated. Climate isn't the complication; humans are. Refusing aid from an ideological ‘enemy' The Ethiopian army invaded a civil-war-savaged Somalia in 2006 and, after a hard-fisted occupation, installed an unpopular and only partly successful transitional federal government. Assorted militias, such as the oft-mentioned al-Shabab (“the youth”), retained the hinterland, where conflicts, raids and molestation of citizens by both sides have been common ever since. Al-Shabab has been driven from Mogadishu, but it is the most commonly cited military villain in this famine. Al-Shabab believes that many Western agencies oppose it because of its desire to make Somalia an Islamist state. Therefore, it restricts the entry of agencies and non-governmental organizations into its area to those it considers neutral – Red Cross/a> and Red Crescent in particular. It rules out the World Food Program and UNICEF and agencies such as CARE. It has created its own Office for the Supervision to Regulate the Affairs of Foreign Agencies. There is denial that famine actually exists too.. “The UN wants Somalia to be in famine,” a spokesman, Ali ohamud Rage, has said. “They want push pressure on us through such calls. We agree that there is hunger in some areas, but there is no famine in Somalia.” Agencies and aid bodies are not always without their flaws, , but it is al-Shabab, not drought, that stands between the starving and the food. Al-Shabab not only threatens aid workers but tries to prevent and punish refugees who try to cross into so-called Christian countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya. It must be terrifying for the men, women and children now trying to get into Kenya to find themselves surrounded by militia men emerging from the thorn trees. Is the transitional federal government in Mogadishu an improvement or another face of the problem? It seems that it is either too venal or too powerless to prevent the plunder of aid food. Joakim Gundul, a Kenyan assessor of aid results, says, “While helping starving people, you are also feeding the power groups who make a business out of the disaster. … You're saving people's lives today so they can die tomorrow.” How the new honesty might backfire... It seems to me that in earlier famines, this issue of human agency has not been nearly as honestly and openly discussed by journalists and officials. K'naan, the famed multitalented Canadian Somali, is rightly appalled at what he sees as a slow reaction of the world to this crisis, but the question arises whether the greater honesty about human blame is slowing the response. The vigour and enthusiasm that came into play in the West's reaction to the Ethiopian famines of the early 1980s has not yet appeared. Aid to Ethiopia lagged in the early phases of that famine too. The West was dubious about then-president Mengistu Haile Mariam's closeness to the Soviets until BBC and CBC footage, combined with the involvement of rock stars and telethons, shamed governments into increasing the flow of aid. And not only governments: A farmer from Guelph, Ont., Fred Benson, galvanized by the news from Ethiopia, gave his 107-acre farm to a Mennonite aid agency for the sake of people whose faces he had never seen. Yet it wasn't much discussed at the time that Mr. Mengistu was arming his troops for a so-called Red Star offensive against the Eritrean rebels with expensive Russian armaments bought with the substance of his starving nation. With my own eyes, at the time, I saw the astonishing quantities of arms and aircraft he had brought to Eritrea, when I was caught unexpectedly for the better part of the week in a besieged town named Nacfa in the Eritrean highlands. As an Eritrean minder told me, “He's blowing schools and clinics out of the mouth of his cannon.” At the same time, Mr. Mengistu was putting great emphasis on celebrating the 10th anniversary of his regime, such that Addis Ababa became a Disneyland of Stalinist achievement in the midst of a hungering populace. Few voices were raised to tell us all this, or to tell us about the forced resettlement of millions into unfamiliar country. If we had known it all, would Fred Benson have been as generous? Would there have been a Bob Geldof? For us today, unfortunately, this Horn of Africa famine is another in a string of almost expected events. We expect that the world will get some emergency aid there. We feel as if we have heard the whole story before. Yet it is an utterly fresh and terrifying experience for the people of the “triangle.” They have tried every way of survival. They have skimped at meals, have seen what crops they could grow wither and have lost their livestock or tried to sell them in a glutted market. Meanwhile, the grain shortage sends prices up, and even encourages hoarding by merchants, while in their huts farmers face the massive question of whether they should eat next year's seed crop, one of the final acts of familial desperation. These starving have looked for eyes of undigested grain in cow manure; they have foraged for wild foods, , yehub nuts and berries, in competition with their neighbours. Any family jewellery has been sold. Many starving women probably have been forced to make a Sophie's choice, whether to feed a child likely to die or one not already sick. And as they slide toward starvation, the devastation of their immune systems will attract assaults by opportunist bacteria. There's no sense of banal repetition in their struggles. Perhaps we must try a new w theorem: to try to get the Somalis and the Ethiopians fed precisely because their governments have not yet created societies in which supply and support are taken for granted. Aid agencies could be given breaks from endless pie charts about administration costs and aid delivery per donor dollar and stop pretending that they will be permitted to go everywhere they like and to do all the good they can. They should simply invite us into the general struggle to deliver aid as energetically, cleverly and well as the malign circumstances on the desolate ground permit them. As for the regimes, Mr. Sen's statement glimmers like a tinsel promise, an undeniable though not immediately useful tool, out there in what aid workers call “the field.” BBut in approaching that dilemma – how to make regimes behave – I have moved far into “wiser-heads-than-mine” territory. And by the time we solved it, there would be millions dead in Africa. Pem>lease supplement your knowledge acquiring from the above entire life-sciences knowledge sharing  with hyperlinked words (just click on them) to transcend your life-understanding with paradigm shift through simply more life-sciences knowledge.... ....Now continue learning related knowledge rere how humans who are fortunate not to suffer famines  look at famine on this Planet Earth and how they endeavour to deal with reducing the famine suffering in the lands of famine.... 220 comments on the above  news article &  .>.strong>.....NOW KEEP ON LEARNING ABOUT /strong> .....ANCIENT PROSPERITY AND INTERNATIONAL PRESTIGE OF SOMALIA.... ......COMPARED TO CONFLICTS AND FAMINES IN SOMALIA TODAY..... The Silk Road extending from southern Europe through Arabia, Somalia, Egypt, Persia, India and Java until it reaches China Ancient pyramidal structures/a>, tombs, ruined cities and stone walls Wargaade Wall littered in Somalia are evidence of an ancient sophisticated civilization that once thrived in the Somali peninsula.[35] The findings of archaeological excavations and research in Somalia show that this civilization had an ancient writing system that remains undeciphered,[36] and enjoyed a lucrative trading relationship with Ancient Egypt and Mycenaean Greece since at least the second millennium BC, which supports evidence of Somalia being the ancient Land of Punt.[37] The Puntites "traded not only in their own produce of incense, ebony and short-horned cattle, but also in goods from other neighboring regions, including gold, ivory and animal skins."[38] According to the temple reliefs at Deir el-Bahari, the Land of Punt was ruled at that time by King Parahu and Queen Ati.[39] Ancient Somalis domesticated the camel somewhere between the third millennium and second millennium BC from where it spread to Ancient Egypt and North Africa.[40] In the classical period, the city states of Mossylon, Opone, Malao, Mundus and Tabae in Somalia developed a lucrative trade network connecting with merchants from Phoenicia, Ptolemaic Egypt, Greece, Parthian Persia, Saba, Nabataea and the Roman Empire. They used the ancient Somali maritime vessel known as the beden to transport their cargo. Ruins of Qa’ableh. After the and the Roman naval presence at Adenn to curb piracy, Arab and Somali merchants by agreement barred Indian ships from trading in the free port cities of the Arabian peninsula[41] to protect the interests of Somali and Arab merchants in the extremely lucrative ancient Red Sea–Mediterranean Sea commerce.[42] However, Indian merchants continued to trade in the port cities of the Somali peninsula, which was free from Roman interference.[43] Ancient cairns Qombo'ul.. The Indian merchants for centuries brought large quantities of cinnamon from Sri Lanka and Indonesia to Somalia and Arabia. This is said to have been the best kept secret of the Arab and Somali merchants in their trade with the Roman and Greek world. The Romans and Greeks believed the source of cinnamon to have been the Somali peninsula, but in reality, the highly valued product was brought to Somalia by way of Indian ships.[44] Through collusive agreement by Somali and Arab traders, Indian/Chinese cinnamon was also exported for far higher prices to North Africa, the Near East and Europe, which made the cinnamon trade a very profitable revenue generator, especially for the Somali merchants through whose hands large quantities were shipped across ancient sea and land routes.[42] ... click here to read the entire history of Somalia and how it is as it today...

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