Famine in Sudan
Foreign Affairs, 6/17–The biggest hunger crisis in the world is unfolding in Sudan, and it is manmade. As of now, more than half of the country’s 45 million people urgently need humanitarian assistance. In May, the United Nations warned that 18 million Sudanese are “acutely hungry” including 3.6 million children who are “acutely malnourished.” The western region of Darfur, where the threat is greatest, is nearly cut off from humanitarian aid. According to one projection, as much as five percent of Sudan’s population could die of starvation by the end of the year…This dire situation is not the result of a bad harvest or climate-induced food scarcity. It is the direct consequence of actions by both sides of Sudan’s terrible civil war…Neither side is likely to relent on its own..the keys to opening the country to aid likely lie in the hands of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the two biggest regional powers vying for influence in the Horn of Africa.
Israeli military guilty of torture
DerSpiegel, 6/7–His father, his five older brothers and he were detained by the Israeli military in late February. The soldiers, he says, discovered a tunnel near their home in Zaitoun, a district of Gaza City, and immediately arrested them. At first, they were locked up in a neighboring home. After a few hours, they were made to undress and sit in a hole in the ground. It was cold, he says, and the soldiers poured water on them and urinated on them. Then, says Obaid, they tied him up, blindfolded him, cut open his underwear with a sharp object and shoved a wooden stick into his anus. He says he begged them to stop. After that, he says, he was brought to a military camp and detained for 18 days. The soldiers there interrogated him over and over again, asking him about his family members, his neighborhood and Hamas. And they repeatedly hit him in the head and upper body, he says, adding that he still has nightmares…
Nigerian workers suffer economic disaster
NY Times, 6/11–Nigeria is facing its worst economic crisis in decades, with skyrocketing inflation, a national currency in free-fall and millions of people struggling to buy food. Only two years ago Africa’s biggest economy…The pain was widespread. Unions strike to protest salaries of around $20 a month. People die in stampedes, desperate for free sacks of rice. Hospitals are overrun with women wracked by spasms from calcium deficiencies...
On a recent morning in a corner of the biggest emergency room in northern Nigeria, three women were convulsing in painful spasms, unable to speak. Each year, the E.R. at Murtala Muhammed Specialist Hospital in Kano…received one or two cases of hypocalcemia caused by malnutrition, said Salisu Garba, a kindly health worker who hurried from bed to bed, ward to ward. Now, with many unable to afford food, the hospital sees multiple cases every day. Mr. Garba was sizing up the women’s husbands. Which source of nutrition he recommended depended on what he thought they could afford. Baobab leaves or tiger nuts for the poor; boiled-up bones for the slightly better off. He laughed at the suggestion that anyone could afford milk.
Gas and poverty in Mozambique
Al Jazeera, 6/16–Economists use the shorthand of “the resource curse” to describe how communities who live atop hidden riches not only fail to profit but also face peril. In 2009, prospectors from the Texas company Anadarko found some of the world’s largest stores of natural gas off the coast of Cabo Delgado in Mozambique. The discovery of gas was at first a cause for celebration…
In 2019, TotalEnergies and its partners unveiled plans to invest $20bn in developing and extracting the gas in the largest foreign venture on the African continent…The people who once made their homes and tended crops there were moved to Quitunda, where construction began in 2018. In place of leveled villages sit a port and an airport along with a power station, street grid, emergency room and hundreds of cabins built to enclose TotalEnergies managers and gas workers within fortress-like walls…
