In an interview with Reuters, Kenya Wolfgang Fengler, a lead economist for the World Bank, has labelled the famine currently devastating Somalia as a “manmade” crisis.
Thousands of men, women and children are dying daily in the famine, and Fengler lays the blame firmly at the door of policy makers.
“Droughts have occurred over and again, but you need bad policy making for that to lead to a famine,” she insisted.
Fengler was reacting after a World Bank report argued that the famine is not a result of weather variables as much as it is the fault of over exaggerated food prices and civil conflict.
The report shows the prices of local food staples in Somalia like maze, wheat, and sugar have soared up 240 percent since 2008. These prices were due to poor harvest, the shrinking of global food stocks, and America’s over production of corn ethanol, all of which contributed to the rising food prices across the Horn of Africa.
On Monday, the World Bank President Robert Zoellick stated: “Nowhere are high food prices, poverty and instability combining to produce tragic suffering more than in the Horn of Africa.”
Zoellick added that Somalia and its Horn of Africa neighbors will stay in the “danger zone” as long as food prices remain high and food stocks remain low.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in agreement with the World Bank’s position on the famine, saying, “Every few decades the cycle repeats. And it would be easy to throw up our hands and blame it all on forces beyond our control. But this cycle is not inevitable.”
Clinton insisted that the world has the resources and tools to make hunger a “memory” and argued it could be done if the political will was present among global leaders.