Kenya: Tragedy as 100,000 starve

Mass starvation as UN reduce food aid The World Food Programme has decided to reduce the food aid programme by 25% at the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya, which houses over 100,000 people, many of whom are children already suffering from malnutrition.

Journalists from the East African Standard visited another camp, Ifo, where they discovered that food rations for seven days have to last for fifteen. A team of journalists also investigated the hospital at Ifo, where they found ten children starving to death.

Refugees told the journalists that the World Food Programme had substituted wheat flour by maize, due to lack of supplies. Wheat flour had the added advantage of healing children with chronic diarrhoea and without it, under-nourished children could face an added risk of death through dehydration.

The WFP itself has admitted that there is a supply problem and that this would develop into a severe crisis by next April if the problem is not addressed, and has appealed to donor countries to increase their contributions.

From the evidence in the field, it would appear that April is optimistic, to say the least. Isn't this a fitting comment to the year 2003, when tens of billions of dollars were wasted in an illegal war, followed by an act of butchery on a monstruous scale - and the children of Africa starve to death because they do not have anything to eat?

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY
PRAVDA.Ru