I am sitting on my front porch surrounded by my own miniature Eden, with beds full of lettuce and basil and beets, garlic about to be harvested, squash and tomato vines taking over the neighborhood. The surrounding houselots, fields and farms are rich with nut trees, wild cherries, and escaped apples and pears. An afternoon stroll may bring back mushrooms, wild garlic, wild grapes, serviceberry, raspberries or blackberries depending on the season, along with lesser-known wild edibles like trout lily bulbs, cattail tubers, or fiddlehead ferns. Even my perennial bed is full of good eats and drinks: daylily flowers, bee balm, burdock and chicory. I consider the lilies of the field--and I eat them.
Amidst this abundance, famine seems unimaginable. Yet as I sit here, tens of thousands of people from the region of Somalia are walking days and weeks across burning desert to reach the largest refugee camp in the world -- Dadaab, an outpost in nowhere, Kenya, originally designed to hold 90,000 refugees of the Great African War and now holding over 400,000 people.
The present famine in Somalia is the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the International Red Cross/Red Crescent. But to call it a famine, suggesting that it is merely a product of random unlucky rainfall cycles or maybe a crop failure, does not begin to accurately describe the situation, any more than the expression 'potato famine' describes the political and sociological disaster that occurred in Ireland in the mid 19th century.
I've heard folks quip cynically, "It's a desert, and it's always been a desert -- you don't want to starve, don't live in a desert." Not true on all counts. This is not the place to debate world desertification, other than to say that much of the world we now know as desert was not desert at one time (check your old testament for its descriptions of hanging gardens, flowing fountains, and towering cedar forests in the Middle East, for example). But many Somalis lived in villages built around wells, rich in cattle and crops plentiful enough to feed everyone amply and have grains, meats and vegetables left over to trade in markets for goods or cash--a permaculture Eden-like environment not unlike my green front yard. Until someone crashed through with tanks, killed the cattle, poisoned the well, salted the fields and raped the women.
Local food security vanishes with the speed of a flame in the face of war. Just ask an American from the South about the impact of Sherman's burning march. The tactic of destroying food resources goes back thousands of years; something about Carthage springs to mind. Permaculture is hardly permanent in the face of tanks and guns, unless one has the bigger guns to protect it, or the cash or gold in a bank account to buy the land and seeds to start over, assuming your bank does not also collapse.
On top of the disaster of war, Somalia has experienced lower-than-usual rainfall for several years. With freedom of movement and trade, Somalis may have resolved the hardship on their own, or with a minimal boost of some temporary food aid, much as those Americans hit by natural disasters like floods rely on. However, militant groups have precluded foreign aid from reaching those affected, escalating the impacts. The press says these groups are 'associated with Al-Qaida,' but I have no way to assess this information--my apologies for the cynicism, but not long ago we were told that all revolutionary groups were associated with Russian Communists; now they seem to all be associated with Al-Qaida. To the mothers watching their children starve to death, it hardly matters.
Political, social and economic security and food security are intimately intertwined. The ancient city of Rome rioted for bread, not because the wheat crop had failed or drought had destroyed farmlands, but because Cleopatra was involved in a pissing match with the powers that be and stopped shipping wheat. The actions of the people who occupy the White House and Capitol Hill, the actions of the people they appoint to our embassies and the United Nations, the wars our nation chooses to get involved with or not get involved with, all play out on the ground not only in terms of soldiers lost on either side, but in terms of which mothers walk for weeks with their dying children to beg for food aid in a desert camp of 400,000 starving, desperate people.
The U.S. has engaged in some half-hearted intervention in Somalia over the last several decades, none of which has worked out terribly well. Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, the U.S. quickly withdrew from Somali intervention, despite declaring the situation in Darfur to constitute a genocide. We have made the decision to commit to very expensive ongoing military action in these two locations, and not in other locations. On such decisions, people live and die.
Few if any among the 400,000 in this one refugee camp--and hundreds of thousands scattered at other camps across Africa--had anything to do with causing the violence which has shattered their lives and left them starving. Certainly the kids who are dying played no role in the global posturing and shoving matches that played a greater role in creating their circumstances than any lack of rain.
This Garden of Eden in my front yard, these rolling green fields and forests, are truly a blessing. On this glorious summer day, it seems impossible that anything could happen to take this wealth of food security and self-sufficiency away. Yet I'm sure that many wise and peaceful farmers throughout the ages have felt the same.
Please consider making a donation to the UNICEF Horn of Africa Emergency Appeal or any of the church, nonprofit or service organizations working on the effort to relieve the worst of this crisis including the Red Cross/Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, and many local religious organizations. And plant a garden, including an extra row for the food shelf -- it is a precious liberty indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment