The Horn of Africa

Chronicle of a famine foretold


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These past few months I have been working on a tool that can complement the "Food Aid Plus" program that gives out seeds in addition to food aid to help make wastelands more productive in Somalia and The Horn of Africa.

As the famine is also the result of the worst drought in living memory (or in the last 60 years), my tool called a Plant Root Injector can deliver even small amounts of water and nutrients/fertilizers directly to plant roots. Almost like the way and for the same reasons medicines are delivered intravenously.

Plant Root Injectors will make plants more robust and capable of producing better yields. With it, the "Food Aid Plus" program can become more successful and sustainable. More importantly, the Plant Root Injectors can be made using commonly discarded materials and by those who will use it themselves.

Use the keywords "Plant Root Injector" to find this tool and videos that show How-to-make and How-to-use it on the web. This is not an advertisement but a simple effort to share the tool to people who can use it especially in this difficult time.

The tool can also be more easily found on these links: ; ; ; and,


Latest news from Mogadishu.
Islamists have run away from Mogadishu. It is now a good time for CIA, TFG and Ugandan/Burundian mercenaries to capture all of Mogadishu to enable WFP distributes food aid in Mogadishu districts/markets.

Will aid agencies continue to micro-manage aid efforts from luxury hotels in Nairobi and addis ababa?

No more excuses to throw rockets at crowded markets or impose unemployment on hardworking Somali families, while using the images of starving Somalis in dirty politics.

Mogadishu is in the hands of the CIA now or will it ever be!


Latest news from the drought in Somalia:

The transitional government soldiers attacked ‘Badbaado’ camp in the AMISOM controlled area in Mogadishu to loot the food aid for starving children and killed 10 people in the process.

I am not surprised, because the current TF government soldiers are from existing warlord militia who used to rob, rape and kill with impunity in Mogadishu before the Islamists kicked them out of Mogadishu in 2006.

They came back with CIA supported Ethiopian invasion and they were given new uniforms, weapons from United States of America, plenty of money from EU and 12,000 African mercenaries to protect them from the Islamists.

No wonder, why many Somalis are supporting the Islamist and their strict version of law and order!

Aid agencies, warlord militia, the Islamists and Ethiopian/Kenyan graduates will benefit from the food aid in Somalia.

Hard working Somali families’ livelihoods will be destroyed while guaranteeing high paid jobs for westerners and their Kenyan/Ethiopian allies.

The response to this current drought crisis is being used to politically justify the daily crowded-market bombardments by the Ugandan/Burundian mercenaries while injecting new confidence in the most hated warlord militias who used to run terror across Mogadishu.

Solution in Somalia is less food aid, reward hardworking Somali families and their subsistence farming produce with technology and skills.

Broad-based bottom up reconciliation initiative that includes Somali Islamists. Impartial justice and accountability process that covers all parties including the AMISOM mercenaries, Ethiopians, Islamist, TFG forces, Warlord militia, private security firms and crusader intelligence groups and everyone who took part in the two decade Somali genocide.


Italy offered nothing, Brazil more than France & Germany combined.I am surprised the economist did not mention how much did Britain offer.


Local islamic terrorism is nothing more than a simple problem a nuclear bomb could not resolve quickly, and they all get their wish to see Allah and their 72 virgins.


I have contributed some money for them. I hope this money reach right hands. As a muslim now we are in Ramadan and we are fasting . So I can understand the famine . I hop God help them.


The Kenyan birther should have realised the strategic value of the narrow strait shich is saddled between the African Horn and South Yemen controlled by Al Shabab and Al Queda respectively.

Now is another chance for Hegemon to make amend its past neglect and backward assing by redeeming itself to democratize the many hungry with a bit of scrape food and some developmental aid.

Mani Mahesh

Such stories really reflect that globalization has helped a few nations, rather than being a world changer. Had the developed nations been keen to help such situations should not have risen. The UN need to step up its mechanisms to address such problems in more efficient manner, before enough damage is being done.

Michael Martinez

This situation exists because western nations refuse to shoulder the burden of "nation building". We should have stayed in Somalia 20 years ago and helped create a functional government. We should have helped to build a sufficient infrastructure to ensure that the Somalis would be able to stand on their own within a generation.

Instead, the western nations have stood by and fostered civil war, piracy, and anarchy in a region that seems to offer little strategic value in their great chessboard calculations.

Only when Al Shabab topples the Somali government and begins to export its version of Jihad will the United Nations and western countries in particular be forced to amend the bad decisions of the early 1990s.

Mr. Deep Pockets

The Somali women and children shown in photographs are always alone - no Somali man in sight to help them. They are off on pirate ships perhaps? This is Darwinism but aid delays the inevitable. It would be better to move these children and women to a 1st world country than leave them with a society that devalues them so much.

Thomas Ash

"When famine threatened Niger in 2005, the cost of help was put at $7 a head. No one did much; the famine struck; the cost of help ended up at $23 each."

What's the source for these figures? I'm doing research on the cost-effectiveness of distaster relief for Giving What We Can ( ) and sources would be helpful for this - if anyone can email me at togash+give10 AT that'd be great.


When the Jasmine scent keep expanding over the space, the Kenyan birther could listen to his heart and mind to come to help the sick land of his ancestors or listen to his geo-strategic instinct to backward ass the hungry people.


Where are all those human rights groupies? The West like to talk about individual freedom, political rights, property rights etc.

But Human rights is more than just these political rights. It is about access to clean water, food on the table, shelther, clothing, education, health care and other basics in lives. Although the scent of Jasmine is around for a while, only the flies are interested.


The scent of Jasmine is everywhere in the air but there is no food for the multitude mouths. The horn is not exactly known for their oil, and the AngloFrench Zionists have looked the other way.


When the Jasmine flowers are about to bloom in the desert of Africa's horn, one would wonder why the National Endowment of Democracy is not doing anything to usher in democracy because it would be much easier done through the empty stomaches.

Living hope

It is only the babies who looked starved, dehydrated,ready for burial, but the mothers look healthy and show no signs of hunger on their faces, and are made pregnant by their off duty visiting terrorists husbands, who looked well fed walking with their AK 47 guns when on duty. Is food aid the result of a staged event for Mass Deception, being promoted to finance terrorist activities, suffering, an murder of the helpless by strvation? Is the famine being acentuated for other purposes?
Sometimes we wonder if the Westen Media is subject to Mass Deception, for money and food, that ends up under the control of All Shabab, to be used to frther promote terrorist activities.
Babies have food, not placed in their mouth, but on their chins for the flies, that gather all over the mouth, eyes etc. It looks like human life the cheapest weapon in arsenal of the terrorists all over the world. Is that suffering of the babises delberately done under instructions,threats from al Shabab to arouse pity? We suspect in the case of Pakistani terrorists, that the clerics get a part of the money given to Pakistan to fight terrorists, but it seems that suicide bombers are picked to blow themselves at selcted places at selectd times and find easy entry to the planned sites. Bin Laden lived in a million dollar home next to the Pakistani Intelligence Services, probably built with U.S. aid money intened to fight terrorists. BBC reporters, CNN reporters must investigate this and clear the air if this is a genuine famine and not mass deception, as we saw with the Bin Laden million dollar aid progeam to fight terrorism rather than something else, and the common way to explit Western Governments.
Rich Muslim countries have not responded to U.N. Secretary General's appeal for money to fight the Somali famine. That is terrible, considering that Charity is one of the pillars of Islam.


Drought in Somalia is like a perpetual natural occurrence. Due to frequent Western support and media coverage, the population of this country has almost doubled in the last 15 years thus imposing tremendous pressure on the land for the population and livestock. Also Western food grains have weaned the population of their coping local mechanisms and local produce that sustained them for centuries earlier. Actually local grain producers have no incentive to produce food as they can't compete the free food aid. Further, in the race for getting all the modern goods that the Western world has, they have killed most of their wildlife and destroyed their pristine forests land like never before. They cut centuries old big trees (extremely difficult to grow in that kind of terrain) and turn them into charcoal and then export to Arabian countries. Destruction is most severe in Eastern Ethiopia and Somalia. This is resulting in perpetual drought conditions in the whole region. Aid agencies are in fact part of the problem with little long term perspective.


Unless the massive population explosion can be broken, more of these people will be joining the Al-Sahbab bros for planting the Jasmine blooms instead of food crops.

Bowl Weevils


"It could be argued that Singapore and Hong Kong are two of the most overpopulated countries in the world and yet they manage the feed the vast majority of their citizenry."

No, it couldn't. You could state accurately that Singapore and HK are two of the most densely populated cities in the world. But dense population does not equal overpopulation. Ask the Netherlanders, who are quite densely populated but who are also exporters of agricultural goods. And look into the history of the Netherlanders' former colony, New York, for even more examples of high population density in close contact with functioning agricultural companies.

"Population control is NEVER the solution, unless of course you're a Nazi"

Playing the Nazi card seriously undermines your credibility. Especially when the world's most prominent example of governmental population control is not in any way the dead for 50+ years Nazi regime of Germany, but rather communist China. And they seem pretty happy with the results.

You also are neglecting that many people in the developed and developing world are in fact engaging in population control. They are doing voluntarily, in conscious planning to have fewer children.

Voluntary population control is just fine, and many people are happy with their choices, and they are not Nazis for having only 1 or 2 children instead of 5. The Nazis would force those pure "aryan" Swedes have 5 children instead of 1.


The sad part is, that we are discussing famine, while people starve. I believe, that finding motives for actions is the wrong way forward. Surely, when I am moved, or indifferent to the hunger of others, I must act? Does it matter how I feel, when others suffer, to others? It is true, that one must welcome death, when death approaches, but also that one must not see death as the only option.
Perhaps, there are no great powers in the world, and it takes a near default on debt for the United States to understand this, and not the starving millions of Somalia.
What makes us act, in dire situations? Do we have to feel desperate to act? How dependable is that feeling?



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