Somaliland: Sleepwalking into disaster

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And then came the global warming hysteria, an idea that has more to do with Europe’s prosperous middle class politics and media than it has to do with Science but which no politician in the West could be seen to question let alone oppose. It basically makes three claims: that the world is warming up; we are causing it; and it is a bad thing. Each of those claims could be challenged but no one dared to be seen on the `wrong’ side of this `debate’.

We in Somaliland didn’t even know the `debate’ was taking place but we certainly did not escape its impact. Some bright spark somewhere in this green global warming swamp decided it was a good idea to put food into combustion engines instead of human mouths. Vast swathes of the world’s most productive arable lands in America and Brazil were converted into `biofuel’ farms. The result is man-made shortage of food across the globe while, ironically the biofuel mass production did not affect the price of fossil fuels at all. It, continued to go up and up.

As nations ran out of staples, the world’s biggest exporters stopped selling food. China, India and Thailand refused to sell Somaliland traders anymore rice. The Burma typhoon didn’t help either. Food donors like America who used to insist on giving cheap wheat to the world’s starving said they would rather give aid agencies hard cash. People like the UNDP who feed our schoolchildren are finding it harder and harder to find food on the world markets.

The poorest of the poor are now starting to eat less and less in every town and every hamlet all over Somaliland. The Hargeisa media is not reporting it because it is in complete shock; just like the rest of the country. We stand frozen in front of an impending catastrophe.