Last week, David Loyn of the BBC wrote about the crisis in Niger and asked “How many dying babies make a famine?”
Famine is a troublesome word with a very specific meaning to the professional aid community.
It is usually taken to define a situation in which a high proportion of the general population are vulnerable to death by hunger-related disease.
This describes a much more intense situation than the loose way that famine is generally understood - and the pictures of starving babies in Niger certainly look like “famine” to the outside world.
In technical terms Niger’s President Mamadou Tandja may be right to say that this is not a famine.
Continue reading ‘Coalition for Darfur: Plagued by Technicalities’
If you liked this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Additional info on subscribing can be found here. Thanks for visiting!
I’m going to be taking some vacation time (not that you’d notice too much difference from my recent rate of posting). Don’t expect much activity here until after Labor Day.
Comment spammers: have at it. I’ll delete your comments later…
Over a year ago, Eugene Oregon of the Coalition for Darfur wrote the post below urging the Bush administration to declare the situation in Darfur a “genocide.” Since then, an estimated 400,000 people have died, Doctors Without Borders is warning that millions of lives “hang in the balance,” and the International Committee of the Red Cross is warning of “chronic instability.”
One year later, we have to ask if the “genocide” declaration made any difference at all. Continue reading ‘Coalition for Darfur: Did it matter?’
Chris Muir (cartoonist of Day by Day) has a sister named Cathy who is fighting cancer. He explains in today’s strip why clicking the ad below will help her.
Please click.
Update (Aug 12): The goal has been met in two days instead of the planned ten. Thanks everyone! No need to click unless you want to learn about ablation as a treatment for cancer.
Sudanese vice-president and former rebel SPLM leader John Garang died in a helicopter crash in southern Sudan over the weekend. Just three weeks ago, Garang was inaugurated as Vice President under the peace agreement designed to bring an end to the 20-year North/South civil war.
Much of the world’s hope for a peaceful solution rested on Garang’s
ability to reign in the genocidal regime in Khartoum and, with his
death, the future of Darfur and the North/South peace accord is now
hard to predict.
All posts
Latest Comments