Belfast Telegraph  Thursday 25 December 2014  Mark Steel: If the
poor of Africa are hungry, send them arms  It's so difficult,
apparently, to work out how to solve the food shortages in
Africa. Because the price of food has just gone up, the way
prices do sometimes, caught by a freak gust of wind or flare
from the sun or something and whoosh, up they go, whether it's
oil or an Olympic Games or rice and it's just bad luck.
Combined with the growing population, it means there's no simple
way of stopping millions of people starving. But fortunately the
same laws don't apply to other essential items, such as arms.
That's why you never get reports saying: "What with the booming
population and rising prices, there just aren't enough weapons
to go round.  "The crisis is so deep there are now allies of
America without access to a single cluster bomb, and in one
region of the Congo warlords have to share one flamethrower
between two. Charities have sent out truckloads of Tomahawk
missiles to Uzbekistan but the queues