8/6/2019 A dream about famine, hunger, malnutrition, drought,
desertification
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A dream about famine, hunger, malnutrition, drought and
desertification
Prof. Dr. Willem Van Cotthem
University of Ghent, Belgium
Do we still have to be convinced that there is an urgent need
for assisting the
millions of people suffering from drought, malnutrition, hunger
and famine in the
Horn of Africa? Who could deny that there is an urgent need of
humanitarian
assistance for them?
A financial gap to respond to this emergency has still to be
closed. That explains
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moons appeal on many top officials
described in my
former posting on this blog.
I am convinced that Mr. Ban Ki-moons voice will be heard and
that in the weeks,
maybe months to come, sufficient humanitarian aid will be
provided. However,
many children and adults will not survive this catastrophe.
Those who will be lucky,
will try to stay alive for a number of years, until a new
catastrophe will come.
And then, the same old story will happen again! Because
emergency aid, noble as it
is, will never change a thing at the causes of those
catastrophes. So, it makes me sad
that all those noble humanitarian aid actions will have to be
repeated, some day,
somewhere, etc, etc., etc.
Tired, after a busy day taking care of my dear wife, who had a
brain stroke and
remained paralyzed already for 3 years now, I wanted to go to
bed for a good nights
rest, when slowly I closed my eyes in front of my computer and
started dreaming.
I heard Mr. Ban Ki-moon pronouncing a beautiful speech about the
urgent need to
use all necessary funds for a worldwide application of the
well-known successful
methods and techniques to produce food crops with a minimum of
water in all the
drylands of this world.
Very well informed, the Secretary-General described a number of
these success
stories, thereby reconfirming the important role of smallholder
farmers and
women. He spoke about successes in dryland management, soil
conditioning, water
harvesting, permaculture, agroforestry, container gardening,
free distribution of
seeds of drought-tolerant plants, nurseries of drought-tolerant
fruit trees, school
gardens, allotments in the cities, vertical gardening and many
best practices more.
At the end of his speech, Mr. Ban Ki-moon made clear to the
audience of world
leaders and directors of the agencies and organizations, that
the most urgent
objective to achieve will be to use our knowledge and skills to
ban the hunger from
this world in the shortest time, not by bringing food to the
hungry, but by teaching
them how to grow fresh food themsel ves, rural and urban people
all the like.
