NOVANEWS

After three years of drought thousands of colourful tents made with sticks and branches wrapped in plastic sheets and bits of cloth have sprung up among Mogadishu’s destroyed buildings. Over the summer and early autumn tens of thousands of starving Somalis entered the city. Now the refugees fill the shells of long-defunct ministries, gather in the shade of the roofless cathedral and stand under the parliament building like worshippers seeking a miracle. They appear in the streets in tattered clothing, holding bundles on their oversized heads, carrying yellow jerrycans and babies on their backs.

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Abuses by All Sides Contribute to Current Crisis

NOVANEWS

“A drought, not seen in 60 years, compounded with near complete lawlessness and utter disregard for human life has made it so.”

Yahoo News

Somalian child bathed while being treated from dehydration at Dadaab camp, Kenya

American idol creator Simon Fuller, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell and The Bob Marley estate globally released a new video on Tuesday for Bob Marley & The Wailers’ 1973 song “Hide Tide Or Low Tide.”

The video shows the East Africa crisis that is affecting more than 9 million people dying of starvation.

Edited by Kevin Macdonald, director of “Last King Of Scotland” and the forthcoming “Marley” documentary, the “Hide Tide Or Low Tide” video includes recent footage of expressionless mothers caring for their children, oblivious toddlers playing amidst skeletons of wildlife, and numerous frail, sick babies.

In one of the more poignant images, a mother draws a bucket from a well only to find it filled with dirt and not one drop of water.

The “High Tide Or Low Tide” lyrics still provoke chills nearly 40 years after the song’s debut. Marley, a late icon, who used his music to encourage social change, sings about one of his mother’s prayers.

“A child is born in this world, he needs protection,” Marley sings, quoting his mother. During the song’s chorus, he pledges unconditional friendship: “In high seas or-a low seas, I’m gonna be your friend”.

FAMINE IN AFRICA

For the first time since 1980’s, the United Nations (UN) has declared a famine in Africa. According to estimates more than 12 million people in the Horn of Africa need urgent help; tens of thousands have already died and hundreds of thousands more risk starvations.

The epicentre of the famine is in Somalia where more than 30,000 children under the age of five have been killed in the last 90 days. A severe drought is seen as the main cause of this tragedy.

The picture is getting murkier by the day as the drought, which is the main cause of the tragedy, is spreading to other regions as well. Not to forget insurgent groups such as the Shabab, who have pledged allegiance to the Al Qaeda, stopping people from fleeing the country and depriving victims of much needed food.

Several aid groups are trying to airlift emergency food. But the famine hit southern part of Somalia has been seen as a dangerous zone, which has claimed the lives of peace keepers and soldiers for years.

While an exceptionally severe drought may be the main cause of this tragedy, it is also a catastrophic breakdown of the world’s collective responsibility as the warning signs have been seen for months and the world has been slow to act.

Partnering with Save the Children, the Marleys, Fuller, and Blackwell are hoping to make an impact. Universal Music Global has agreed to donate all profits from the video.

Several celebrities including Lady Gaga, Beckhams and Justin Bieber are supporting the initiative and are encouraging their fans to watch the video and donate.

The innovative viral campaign with the incredible power and reach of social networks is expected to help tackle the first famine of the 21st century.

Go to ImGonnaBeYourFriend.org to make a donation.

YouTube – Veterans Today -Bob Marley new released video “Hide tide or low tide”

NOVANEWS

by Michel Chossudovsky

First published in 1994, Third World Resurgence and Le monde diplomatique

The IMF Intervention in the Early 1980s

Somalia was a pastoral economy based on “exchange” between nomadic herdsmen and small agriculturalists. Nomadic pastoralists accounted for 50 percent of the population. In the 1970s, resettlement programs led to the development of a sizeable sector of commercial pastoralism. Livestock contributed to 80 percent of export earnings until 1983. Despite recurrent droughts, Somalia remained virtually self-sufficient in food until the 1970s.

The IMF-World Bank intervention in the early 1980s contributed to exacerbating the crisis of Somali agriculture. The economic reforms undermined the fragile exchange relationship between the “nomadic economy” and the “sedentary economy” – i.e. between pastoralists and small farmers characterized by money transactions as well as traditional barter. A very tight austerity program was imposed on the government largely to release the funds required to service Somalia’s debt with the Paris Club. In fact, a large share of the external debt was held by the Washington-based financial institutions.’ According to an ILO mission report:

[T]he Fund alone among Somalia’s major recipients of debt service payments, refuses to reschedule. (…) De facto it is helping to finance an adjustment program, one of whose major goals is to repay the IMF itself.

Towards the Destruction of Food Agriculture

The structural adjustment program reinforced Somalia’s dependency on imported grain. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, food aid increased fifteen-fold, at the rate of 31 percent per annum.’ Combined with increased commercial imports, this influx of cheap surplus wheat and rice sold in the domestic market led to the displacement of local producers, as well as to a major shift in food consumption patterns to the detriment of traditional crops (maize and sorghum). The devaluation of the Somali shilling, imposed by the IMF in June 1981, was followed by periodic devaluations, leading to hikes in the prices of fuel, fertilizer and farm inputs. The impact on agricultural producers was immediate particularly in rain-fed agriculture, as well as in the areas of irrigated farming. Urban purchasing power declined dramatically, government extension programs were curtailed, infrastructure collapsed, the deregulation of the grain market and the influx of “food aid” led to the impoverishment of farming communities.’

Also, during this period, much of the best agricultural land was appropriated by bureaucrats, army officers and merchants with connections to the government.’ Rather than promoting food production for the domestic market, the donors were encouraging the development of so-called “high value-added” fruits, vegetables, oilseeds and cotton for export on the best irrigated farmland.

Collapse of the Livestock Economy

As of the early 1980s, prices for imported livestock drugs increased as a result of the depreciation of the currency. The World Bank encouraged the exaction of user fees for veterinarian services to the nomadic herdsmen, including the vaccination of animals. A private market for veterinary drugs was promoted. The functions performed by the Ministry of Livestock were phased out, with the Veterinary Laboratory Services of the ministry to be fully financed on a cost-recovery basis. According to the World Bank:
Veterinarian services are essential for livestock development in all areas, and they can be provided mainly by the private sector. (… Since few private veterinarians will choose to practice in the remote pastoral areas, improved livestock care will also depend on “para vets” paid from drug sales.’

The privatization of animal health was combined with the absence of emergency animal feed during periods of drought, the commercialization of water and the neglect of water and rangeland conservation. The results were predictable: the herds were decimated and so were the pastoralists, who represent 50 percent of the country’s population. The “hidden objective” of this program was to eliminate the nomadic herdsmen involved in the traditional exchange economy. According to the World Bank, “adjustments” in the size of the herds are, in any event, beneficial because nomadic pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa are narrowly viewed as a cause of environmental degradation.”

The collapse in veterinarian services also indirectly served the interests of the rich countries: in 1984, Somalian cattle exports to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries plummeted as Saudi beef imports were redirected to suppliers from Australia and the European Community. The ban on Somali livestock imposed by Saudi Arabia was not, however, removed once the rinderpest disease epidemic had been eliminated.

Destroying the State

The restructuring of government expenditure under the supervision of the Bretton Woods institutions also played a crucial role in destroying food agriculture. Agricultural infrastructure collapsed and recurrent expenditure in agriculture declined by about 85 percent in relation to the mid-1970s.” The Somali government was prevented by the IMF from mobilizing domestic resources. Tight targets for the budget deficit were set. Moreover, the donors increasingly provided “aid”, not in the form of imports of capital and equipment, but in the form of “food aid”. The latter would in turn be sold by the government on the local market and the proceeds of these sales (i.e. the so-called “counterpart funds”) would be used to cover the domestic costs of development projects. As of the early 1980s, “the sale of food aid” became the principal source of revenue for the state, thereby enabling donors to take control of the entire budgetary process.”

The economic reforms were marked by the disintegration of health and educational programmes.’3 By 1989, expenditure on health had declined by 78 percent in relation to its 1975 level. According to World Bank figures, the level of recurrent expenditure on education in 1989 was about US$ 4 Per annum per primary school student down from about $ 82 in 1982. From 1981 to 1989, school enrolment declined by 41 percent (despite a sizeable increase in the population of school age), textbooks and school materials disappeared from the class-rooms, school buildings deteriorated and nearly a quarter of the primary schools closed down. Teachers’ salaries declined to abysmally low levels.

The IMF-World Bank program has led the Somali economy into a vicious circle: the decimation of the herds pushed the nomadic pastoralists into starvation which in turn backlashes on grain producers who sold or bartered their grain for cattle. The entire social fabric of the pastoralist economy was undone. The collapse in foreign exchange earnings from declining cattle exports and remittances (from Somali workers in the Gulf countries) backlashed on the balance of payments and the state’s public finances leading to the breakdown of the government’s economic and social programs.

Small farmers were displaced as a result of the dumping of subsidized US grain on the domestic market combined with the hike in the price of farm inputs. The impoverishment of the urban population also led to a contraction of food consumption. In turn, state support in the irrigated areas was frozen and production in the state farms declined. The latter were slated to be closed down or privatized under World Bank supervision.

According to World Bank estimates, real public-sector wages in 1989 had declined by 90 percent in relation to the mid-1970s. Average wages in the public sector had fallen to US$ 3 a month, leading to the inevitable disintegration of the civil administration.” A program to rehabilitate civil service wages was proposed by the World Bank (in the context of a reform of the civil service), but this objective was to be achieved within the same budgetary envelope by dismissing some 40 percent of public-sector employees and eliminating salary supplements.” Under this plan, the civil service would have been reduced to a mere 25,000 employees by 1995 (in a country of six million people). Several donors indicated keen interest in funding the cost associated with the retrenchment of civil servants.”

In the face of impending disaster, no attempt was made by the international donor community to rehabilitate the country’s economic and social infrastructure, to restore levels of purchasing power and to rebuild the civil service: the macro-economic adjustment measures proposed by the creditors in the year prior to the collapse of the government of General Siyad Barre in January 1991 (at the height of the civil war) called for a further tightening over public spending, the restructuring of the Central Bank, the liberalization of credit (which virtually thwarted the private sector) and the liquidation and divestiture of most of the state enterprises.

In 1989, debt-servicing obligations represented 194.6 percent of export earnings. The IMF’s loan was cancelled because of Somalia’s outstanding arrears. The World Bank had approved a structural adjustment loan for US$ 70 million in June 1989 which was frozen a few months later due to Somalia’s poor macro-economic performance. ’7 Arrears with creditors had to be settled before the granting of new loans and the negotiation of debt rescheduling. Somalia was tangled in the straightjacket of debt servicing and structural adjustment.

Famine Formation in sub-Saharan Africa:  The Lessons of Somalia

Somalia’s experience shows how a country can be devastated by the simultaneous application of food “aid” and macro-economic policy. There are many Somalias in the developing world and the economic reform package implemented in Somalia is similar to that applied in more than 100 developing countries. But there is another significant dimension: Somalia is a pastoralist economy, and throughout Africa both nomadic and commercial livestock are being destroyed by the IMF-World Bank program in much the same way as in Somalia. In this context, subsidized beef and dairy products imported (duty free) from the European Union have led to the demise of Africa’s pastoral economy. European beef imports to West Africa have increased seven-fold since 1984: “the low quality EC beef sells at half the price of locally produced meat. Sahelian farmers are finding that no-one is prepared to buy their herds”.”

The experience of Somalia shows that famine in the late 20th century is not a consequence of a shortage of food. On the contrary, famines are spurred on as a result of a global oversupply of grain staples. Since the 1980s, grain markets have been deregulated under the supervision of the World Bank and US grain surpluses are used systematically as in the case of Somalia to destroy the peasantry and destabilize national food agriculture. The latter becomes, under these circumstances, far more vulnerable to the vagaries of drought and environmental degradation.

Throughout the continent, the pattern of “sectoral adjustment” in agriculture under the custody of the Bretton Woods institutions has been unequivocally towards the destruction of food security. Dependency vis-à-vis the world market has been reinforced, “food aid” to sub-Saharan Africa increased by more than seven times since 1974 and commercial grain imports more than doubled. Grain imports for sub-Saharan Africa expanded from 3.72 million tons in 1974 to 8.47 million tons in 1993. Food aid increased from 910,000 tons in 1974 to 6.64 million tons in l993.

“Food aid”, however, was no longer earmarked for the drought-stricken countries of the Sahelian belt; it was also channeled into countries which were, until recently, more or less self-sufficient in food. Zimbabwe (once considered the bread basket of Southern Africa) was severely affected by the famine and drought which swept Southern Africa in 1992. The country experienced a drop of 90 percent in its maize crop, located largely in less productive lands.” Yet, ironically, at the height of the drought, tobacco for export (supported by modem irrigation, credit, research, etc.) registered a bumper harvest. While “the famine forces the population to eat termites”, much of the export earnings from Zimbabwe’s tobacco harvest were used to service the external debt.

Under the structural adjustment program, farmers have increasingly abandoned traditional food crops; in Malawi, which was once a net food exporter, maize production declined by 40 percent in 1992 while tobacco output doubled between 1986 and 1993. One hundred and fifty thousand hectares of the best land was allocated to tobacco .2′ Throughout the 1980s, severe austerity measures were imposed on African governments and expenditures on rural development drastically curtailed, leading to the collapse of agricultural infrastructure. Under the World Bank program, water was to become a commodity to be sold on a cost-recovery basis to impoverished farmers. Due to lack of funds, the state was obliged to withdraw from the management and conservation of water resources. Water points and boreholes dried up due to lack of maintenance, or were privatized by local merchants and rich farmers. In the semi-arid regions, this commercialization of water and irrigation leads to the collapse of food security and famine.

Concluding Remarks

While “external” climatic variables play a role in triggering off a famine and heightening the social impact of drought, famines in the age of globalization are man-made. They are not the consequence of a scarcity of food but of a structure of global oversupply which undermines food security and destroys national food agriculture. Tightly regulated and controlled by international agri-business, this oversupply is ultimately conducive to the stagnation of both production and consumption of essential food staples and the impoverishment of farmers throughout the world. Moreover, in the era of globalization, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program bears a direct relationship to the process of famine formation because it systematically undermines all categories of economic activity, whether urban or rural, which do not directly serve the interests of the global market system.

(for footnotes see Chapter in the Globalization of Poverty)

NOVANEWS

Khaled Hassan

In Somalia and possibly in Afghanistan and to Iraq rebels a lot, and warriors Cherson, and freedom fighters owners quite military, but their cause is greater than their abilities, and betrayed their minds, there’s finally seen the road, or at least we do not know, and affect the people strongly the view of the impact and presence with flexible.

Is the crisis of leadership and leadership, a crisis of mind of a great, does not think only what promotes his nation and liberate his country and the achievement of dignity and independence of will and resolution, was led by educated adults, but are abused a lot, and rare of them shown the strength and flexibility and capacity of the mind and the horizon and noble qualities, and the ability to see if the solution was less than hoped.

And impressed by the colonial penetrates the Arab countries and Somalia, in strength to Iran revolution, is Rights Reserved destruction and occupation of the country without the other? Perhaps, or the wonder of the countries do not like shaky substitute trusteeship system, and strengthen the independent life of dignity.

Sometimes I feel that we are moving in all directions, and note the position here and there, and we are keen to have a presence and impact, but Billabih and the ambiguity and confusion, and did not care much the completion of a pragmatic position, and we chose side battles and perhaps the maze, and put ourselves sometimes place of history and sometimes in defense of certain options, and sacrificed the long road to freedom, independence and dignity.

Required from the intellectual or writer or thinker living and free to give priority to the fact not to put himself where history, not to mortgage the same fate, expectations and estimates, and to defend what he thinks is correct, and Scottna error means we have canceled any need or role for us.

What does it mean to speak of positive criticism if it is required of us is only silence?! Sometimes you want America to reduce its enemies, and employs a moderate Islamic party to another party and the militant Islamic deduction drawn both to the bloody fighting, the classification ability of the U.S. for setting, as is happening today in Somalia wounded.

But is what is required is a statement that “the important American achievement,” and that the war resisters to the occupation targeted in the hands of fellow veterans of the same path Tina “Islamic”, who accepted the umbrella of America, as, without any attention to the completion of a pragmatic position, even when the digestion and injustice?

Islamic courts were divided, “U.S.” into two parts, that takes one face of the other, and weaken each other, while the sponsor of the division and possibly fighting, watching the situation, is assigned a pro against the Warrior, and the old policy is renewed, I tried in Afghanistan between enemy brothers and between Iraq and Iran and in the others, but what position is possible, though unjust, which is injected into the blood?! The highest priority, to prevent the fighting as possible and keep the rest of independence and dignity.

Do we condemn the opposition because they bypassed the right thing and rushed in government and wasted blood infallible, and Ndandan on this point, and just made my mistake, Avciadtha, and stop at the borders of a particular party does not faulted Ntaadah?!

Nteki or right that the “American Achievement” and the subtle report, “Rand” with the “moderate” Islamists to strike the “radical” Islamists to condemn the pro-occupier and understand the behavior of opponents?!

Or get out a practical stance that preserves the dignity of the rest of Somalia, independence and injected into the blood and warns of U.S. employment for the party making it an entity to fight yesterday’s companions, in the interest of U.S.?!

And impressed the nation playing in the reports and studies of colonial and make the noblest of its people submissive, and the volatility and placed upside down, just because it came from “experts, American” in igniting the wars and strife, looting goods and wealth, or is the ability to implement what draws us, but this time, Masalh Sharia and evidence irrefutable argument? !

NOVANEWS

U.S. helicopters launched an attack on a car carrying members of the Young Mujahideen Movement in the village of southern Somalia, killing some people who were inside one of them leaders of al Qaeda in Somalia.

A U.S. official in Washington, requesting anonymity: “The dead man was Kenyan Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan requested under investigation in the attack on a hotel in Mombasa and attempting to overthrow the Zionist aircraft during take-off from the city’s airport, the year 2002.”

The stations “ABC News and Fox News”, citing U.S. officials “that Nabhan was killed when a U.S. helicopter fired at least fire on the convoy carrying al Qaeda suspects in southern Somalia on Monday,” according to Agence France-Presse.

The U.S. official said on ABC’s “ABC”: “The vessel of the U.S. Navy was in the neighborhood to follow up the situation and provide support in case of necessity”, as mentioned television, “ABC” that the body of Saleh Nabhan is now in the possession of U.S. forces.

One of the officials explained that a number of elements of the plane landed on board, and took with them the body believed to be the Nabhan, in order to verify his identity.

He noted that the air raid came after information to U.S. forces that Nabhan is in the region, pointing out that U.S. troops have been monitoring the situation for several days before the raid.

According to farmers in the town, “Barwa” Somalia, where the raid took place, that most of the helicopter involved in the targeting of a car and those on board, and at least two were killed in the attack.

The witnesses said that some of the helicopters landed and pulled a number of wounded and dead out of the vehicle and took them with them.

The Minister of Disarmament in Somalia’s interim government, Ali Mohamed Farhan, to network, “CNN” of a U.S. air strike, and that the attack took place in the town of Barwa south of the country.

And the region obtained by the process in Somalia under the control of the Mujahideen Youth Movement who are working since last May to bring down the transitional government led by Sheikh Sharif Ahme