How To Survive Famine

Midday open thread

The worst drought in 60 years in the Horn of Africa has sparked a severe food crisis and high malnutrition rates, with parts of Kenya and Somalia experiencing pre-famine conditions, the United Nations has said.

More than 10 million people are now affected in drought-stricken areas of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda and the situation is deteriorating, it said.

"Two consecutive poor rainy seasons have resulted in one of the driest years since 1950/51 in many pastoral zones," the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told a media briefing. "There is no likelihood of improvement until 2012".

released a chart yesterday showing that law schools are churning out far more lawyers than the number of available legal positions.  That is old news, of course.  What's worse is that the oversupply promises to continue.  In 2010, Georgetown enrolled 591 first year JD students, Harvard enrolled 531, Fordham enrolled 477, and NYU enrolled 476.  Large classes are not limited to top schools: New York Law School took in 641, John Marshall (Chicago) enrolled 539, and Suffolk enrolled 531. (Let's not talk about the 808 first year students taken by Florida Coastal and 1,583 by Cooley.)  Law schools now pump out about 45,000 graduates annually at a time when the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 28,000 new lawyer positions per year. The Cuomo administration is seeking to lift what has effectively been a moratorium in New York State on hydraulic fracturing, a controversial technique used to extract natural gas from shale, state environmental regulators said on Thursday.

The process would be allowed on private lands, opening New York to one of the fastest-growing — critics would say reckless — areas of the energy industry.

June was the deadliest month in nearly a year for U.S. service members in Afghanistan and Iraq even as the United States said that improved security in both countries allows it to reduce troops in those war zones.

Sixty U.S. service members were killed in the wars in June, from hostile and nonhostile incidents. The last time the United States lost that many troops in a month was last July, when 65 American service members died in Afghanistan and four were killed in Iraq.

In one phrase, the key lesson is there are no shortcuts.

To Survive Famine, Will Work for Insurance - Opinionator

How much would it cost to prevent a famine? We don’t know exactly, but one answer is surely this: Much less than it would cost to save lives after famine hits.  The relief group Oxfam estimates that emergency relief in famines costs seven times as much as preventing the disaster to begin with.

In Ethiopia — long a country of recurring famines — cycles of drought and flash flooding are worsening and grain harvests are falling.  More than 13 million people in Ethiopia are kept alive by sacks of grain and cans of cooking oil from the United Nations World Food Program . And as the W.F.P. and others have warned , climate change is likely to make things even worse. This situation is not sustainable. The number of starving people will grow; the number of bags of food needed to keep them alive will grow.  The very precariousness of the harvest makes the yield more precarious still:  out of fear, farmers do not try new methods that can bring them higher yields.  They cannot take out loans to buy the drought-resistant seeds and tools to bring a bigger harvest, because they cannot be sure of repaying the loans.  They need to know they will have money left over to feed their families and plant again should the harvest fail, so they invest less in farming.  Insecurity is a vicious circle that is starting to spin faster and faster.

“After the 2003 crisis in Ethiopia there was a big shift in the ways the World Food Program, the World Bank and governments started to look at food security,” said Richard Choularton, Senior Policy Officer for Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction at the W.F.P.  “We’ve known for a long time that being only responsive is not the most effective way to manage food crises.  In the past, we only distributed food.  Now we have a more flexible approach focusing on what we need to do to address hunger.”

The W.F.P., which now is keeping some 100 million people in 75 countries from starvation, had long worked with governments to give people bags of food in exchange for their labor on community infrastructure projects.  Many of these were projects that helped farmers, such as tree-planting, building feeder roads or dams, or terracing land.  (When I visited Ethiopia two years ago, I saw rural schools with bags of grain and cans of oil stacked up to give to families of girls who completed the semester — a good way to encourage parents to keep their girls in school.)  In places where food is available in the market but too expensive, the W.F.P. now gives people cash or vouchers to buy food locally produced by their neighbors instead of sacks of grain. About 30 million people in 60 countries participate in some form of food-for-work or cash-for-work.

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