East African Famine

Hospitals & Asylums

$1 billion Drought and East African Famine HA-8-8-11

By Anthony J. Sanders

I am writing to invite everyone to my birthday party on Hospitals & Asylums Day August 11 to watch the Perseid Meteors. More than 11 million people across the Horn of Africa are in urgent need of food assistance (Help WFP ’11). The Horn of Africa is facing one of the worst droughts in decades and the situation in war-torn Somalia has become extremely dire. The United Nations declared famine in two areas of southern Somalia: Bakool and Lower Shabelle. Famine is declared when more than two adults or four children die per 10,000 people, when over 30 percent of the children suffer acute malnutrition rates, and when people have access to less than 2,100 kilocalories per day. U.S. officials say drought and famine in Somalia have killed nearly 30,000 children during the last three months and the United Nations says more than 600,000 children are acutely malnourished (Gollust’11). Tens of thousands of Somalis are fleeing violence, insecurity and starvation. In 2011 alone, some 184,000 Somalis had arrived in neighboring countries of asylum, notably Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti, including more than 46,000 people who arrived during the first three weeks of July. WFP is providing food assistance to about 498,000 refugees in Kenya, out of a total 1.6 million people receiving food around the country. The Kenyan government feeds an additional 800,000 people. Refugees continue crossing the border into Ethiopia as well, though their numbers have fallen from 2,000 per day to less than 1,000. In the first half of 2011 alone, more than 83,000 Somalis fled into Kenya and over 54,000 into Ethiopia. In July, daily arrivals in each country ranged from 1,300 to 1,700. An additional 2,600 Somalis had crossed the north-western border into Djibouti by mid-2011. The refugees say they fled a combination of violence and drought in Somalia (UNHCR ’11). As the drought wears on, the number of people who will be in need of food assistance is expected to rise to 3.2 million people by August. WFP plans to increase its assistance to over 3.5 million people in drought-affected regions of Somalia (WPF ’11). UNHCR is asking for $145 million and WPF is asking for $800 million, down from $1.6 billion in July. The famine is expected to last until December. Relief efforts need to be fully funded, the Somali interior secured, and the clouds seeded so it will rain.

Drought Refugees Estimated Impact on Current Southern East African Population Statistics, July 2011

Country	Population July 2009	Growth Rate 2009	Estimated Population July 2010	Estimated Population July 2011	Migration of Refugees	Population Adjusted for Refugees
Djibouti	724,622	2.164%	735,506	752,444	25,000	777,444
Ethiopia	85,237,338	3.2%	87,964,584	90,778,848	475,000	91,278,848
Kenya	39,002,772	2.7%	40,053,000	41,080,000	500,000	41,580,000
Somalia	9,832,017	2.8%	10,074,400	10,382,800	-1,000,000	9,382,800

Source: HA Atlas Africa 2010

New arrivals to the camp receive high-energy biscuits to satisfy their nutritional needs for a day, in addition to a three-week ration of food. Small children and pregnant mothers are also receiving specialized food products tailored to their needs. Malnutrition rates remain very high among new arrivals. Some 50 per cent of children under five arrive at Dolo Ado suffering from acute malnutrition. Over 28 metric tons of fortified peanut paste called “Supplementary Plumpy” has been flown into Mogadishu so far out of a total 100 metric tons intended for some 35,000 malnourished children. Ready to Use Foods (RUF) are better suited to meet the nutritional needs of young and moderate malnourished children than Fortified Blended Foods (FBF). RUFs distributed by WFP may contain vegetable fat, dry skimmed milk, malt dextrin, sugar and whey (WFP ’11). UNHCR distribution of emergency assistance packages that consist of core relief items, such as jerry cans, buckets, pots, plates and other utensils which allow people to prepare and store safely the water and food they received from WFP and others. The packages also include high-energy biscuits, oral re-hydration salts and water purification tables. Furthermore, UNHCR will distribute other essential non-food items such as plastic sheeting, sleeping mats and blankets. The refugee camps will need solar power for lighting, television, computers and radio as well as gas cooking to prevent the depletion of the trees and ecological deterioration around the camps that need to collectively invest in agriculture if the land and water are any good at all.

Source: World Sites Atlas Political Map of Sudan and the Horn of Africa

The unmet needs of UNHCR and WFP are estimated at $945 million of the $3 billion total cost of the relief effort. The United States and European government should join together to pay the full costs of the relief efforts today and begin seeding the clouds in the region to encourage the rains to fall. Once the UN relief agencies have been paid with Official Development Assistance (ODA) from industrialized nation governments and we presume basic human needs are provided for, private food drives, religious missionaries and collective farming should be encouraged to contribute to raise the standard of living above the minimum needed to sustain human life. Raising this money is somewhat complicated by the precarious economic situation in the United States, whose credit rating was downgraded, and Europe both of whom face about a one in three chance of another recession. The most logical source of this $1 billion quantity of legitimate European-American money is the Deepwater Horizon overpayment. The United States and Europe need to settle this dispute once and for all. When I wrote the settlement in 2010 I asked for BPs $20 billion in profits, it was settled by the President the next day, when I was wrongfully evicted, and then Congress wrongfully terminated the employment of the BP CEO who took responsibility for the failings of US contractors, namely Halliburton, and the settlement was increased to $40-50 billion to cover the estimated long term economic damages caused by environmental degradation of the fishing industry estimated to last more than a decade. The large sum of capital helped to get the work done, it was covered by National Geographic monthly, and by Spring 2011 Gulf seafood was reported safe to eat. The excessive fines for economic damages caused economic damage. When it was attempted to withdraw money from this fund to pay for damages caused by flooding and tornadoes the security exchange declined. This money is improperly invested and the United States and Europe need to get together to split the unspent proceeds between 2011-2012 U.S. Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) grants, this WFP, UNCHR famine relief effort in East Africa and a return to the badly abused BP corporation, to close the case and liberate the market economy. The U.S. President is the most responsible party of this irresponsible money and it should not be difficult for him to procure $1 billion therefrom for the WFP UNHCR famine relief effort in East Africa and create a sustainable FEMA style social safety net in East Africa, permanently raising levels of development assistance to the region, with particular concern for Somalia that receives no US aid, while dispensing with this disputed settlement and move on to the styrene industry whose diversion may be more liable for global warming and natural disasters than any other (Sanders ’11).

North East African Table, July 2009

	Population	GDP in billions of US dollars	GDP per capita in US dollars	Official Development Assistance in millions of US dollars	US Aid in millions of US dollars	US Military Assistance in millions of dollars
Ethiopia	85,237,338	76.74	900	3,327	468	2
Kenya	39,002,772	63.73	1,600	1,360	522	0
Somalia	9,832,017	5.731	600	758	N/A	0
Drought Affected Southern Region	134,072,127	146.201	1,100	5,445	990	2
Eritrea	5,647,168	4.198	700	143	3	0
Djibouti	724,622	2.011	2,800	121	0	0
Northern Region	6,371,780	6.209	974	264	3	0
Horn of Africa Total	140,443,907			5,709	993	2
Egypt	78,866,635	471.2	6,000	1,348	671	1,301

Source: HA Atlas 2010; Empirical US Foreign Assistance Statistics at the Close of the American Imperial Century:

An Act to Secure a Voluntary 1 percent ODA Tax on Income HA-31-9-10

The security situation in Somalia cannot be resolved by money and food alone. WFP is supplying cooked meals to around 85,000 people per day in the war-ravaged Somali capital, in the face of daunting security challenges. WFP is scaling up its operations to feed 1.5 million drought-affected areas of Somalia. Getting aid to the country has been difficult because Al-Shabaab controls much of the country's most desperate areas (Straziuso ’11). Al-Shabaab, which dominates the southern part of Somalia, maintains there is no famine and has barred the entry of aid groups other than the International Committee of the Red Cross (Gollust ’11). After some diplomatic efforts relief convoys have begun paying Al-Shabaab to deliver relief to the regions they control. Without an effective government the Al-Shabaab is best recognized as an Islamic political party with more respect for humanitarian law than humanitarian assistance, due consideration for a political contribution but in need of a legitimate government to receive the Customs duties the Somali government is due. Al-Shabaab’s resistance creates a diplomatic impasse that could deteriorate into the sort of colonial warfare we have had with the Taliban in Afghanistan but might also be easily constituted into a legitimate government along the lines of Somali Ambassador to the UN approved Customs duties split between the local, provincial and national government. How taxable is the relief effort? The UN is immune from taxation. The people need food. Al-Shabaab wants money. Al-Shabaab is not a recognized terrorist organization and it would be much nicer to incorporate their services as officers into the federal government of Somalia on the basis of shared tax revenues. US relief workers should pay their pay their non-social security payroll taxes to the national government(s) in which they are stationed, as Customs duties. Al-Shabaab cannot have more than the local share of these duties if they do the job. As the result of long anarchy, sometime blissful, gone to piracy, warfare and drought during the Obama Administration, not only has the government and civilization been torn by war, but nature itself has been in drought. Since the suicide bombing at the medical school graduation that took the lives of several Ministers, Somalia is probably the absolute least developed country in the world. Humanitarian assistance to this region is the primary purpose of the human race, at this time. Relief efforts have invariably had a pacifying effect on markets in the past. For the economy to function, the economy needs to function. Aid to East Africa is the first $1 billion day of wealth Creation, after the Crash. Neglecting to first finance famine relief in the Horn of Africa, will cause the failure of all other macro-economic efforts, however if the economy fulfills its primary purpose of providing aid to East Africa, the economy should be free to grow.

To end the famine we must end the drought. Cloud seeding, a form of weather modification, is the attempt to change the amount or type of precipitation that falls from clouds, by dispersing substances into the air that serve as cloud condensation or ice nuclei, which alter the microphysical processes within the cloud. The most common chemicals used for cloud seeding include silver iodide and dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide). The expansion of liquid propane into a gas has also been used and can produce ice crystals at higher temperatures than silver iodide. The use of hygroscopic materials, such as salt, is increasing in popularity because of some promising research results. Seeding of clouds requires that they contain super-cooled liquid water—that is, liquid water colder than zero degrees Celsius. Introduction of a substance such as silver iodide, which has a crystalline structure similar to that of ice, will induce freezing nucleation. Dry ice or propane expansion cools the air to such an extent that ice crystals can nucleate spontaneously from the vapor phase. Seeding of warm-season or tropical cumulonimbus (convective) clouds seeks to exploit the latent heat released by freezing. This strategy of "dynamic" seeding assumes that the additional latent heat adds buoyancy, strengthens updrafts, ensures more low-level convergence, and ultimately causes rapid growth of properly selected clouds. Cloud seeding chemicals may be dispersed by aircraft (as in the second figure) or by dispersion devices located on the ground (generators, as in first figure, or canisters fired from anti-aircraft guns or rockets). For release by aircraft, silver iodide flares are ignited and dispersed as an aircraft flies through the inflow of a cloud. When released by devices on the ground, the fine particles are carried downwind and upwards by air currents after release.

Vincent Schaefer (1906–1993) discovered the principle of cloud seeding using dry ice in July 1946. Within the month, Schaefer's colleague, the noted atmospheric scientist Dr. Bernard Vonnegut (brother of novelist Kurt Vonnegut) is credited with discovering another method for "seeding" supercooled cloud water using silver iodide. The first attempt to modify natural clouds in the field through "cloud seeding" began during a flight that began in upstate New York on 13 November 1946. Schaefer was able to cause snow to fall near Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts, after he dumped six pounds of dry ice into the target cloud from a plane after a 60 mile easterly chase from the Schenectady County Airport. From March 1967 until July 1972, the U.S. military's Operation Popeye cloud-seeded silver iodide to extend the monsoon season over North Vietnam, specifically the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The operation resulted in the targeted areas seeing an extension of the monsoon period an average of 30 to 45 days. The 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron carried out the operation to "make mud, not war". In 1969 at the Woodstock Festival, various people claimed to have witnessed clouds being seeded by the U.S. military. This was said to be the cause of the rain which lasted throughout most of the festival. An attempt by the United States military to modify hurricanes in the Atlantic basin using cloud seeding in the 1960s was called Project Stormfury was discontinued. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation of the Department of Interior sponsored several cloud seeding research projects under the umbrella of Project Skywater from 1964 to 1988, and NOAA conducted the Atmospheric Modification Program from 1979 to 1993. The sponsored projects were carried out in several states and two countries (Thailand and Morocco), studying both winter and summer cloud seeding. Reclamation sponsored a small cooperative research program with six Western states called the Weather Damage Modification Program, from 2002–2006. To win the loyalty of Al-Shabaab the UN must make the rains come. Cloud seeding is moderately effective at making it rain, maybe the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) can put cloud seeding to legitimate use ending the drought in the Horn of Africa (Sanders ’10).

To provide security to the region it is time for African Command (AFRICOM) to be deployed. The President of the United States must understand that this is an exclusively humanitarian mission between General Cater F. Ham, Commander of AFRICOM and Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State. Commander Ham, a white man, will have to legislate the African-American Commander of AFRICOM requirement, himself. As the drafter of AFRICOM I am disappointed that the African-American President did not uphold the law, that the Commander of AFRICOM must be African-American, that not only justified the political creation of AFRICOM with General Ward, but helped to secure his own election. AFRICOM can still work as a humanitarian assistance operation with the accounting of the Secretary of State. If AFRICOM does not deploy they may continue to be fined, in behalf of the closing foreign military base industry, for the cost of humanitarian relief without any shame to either the security exchange or federal budget. Collective self-defense of themselves, aid convoys and refugees against armed attack is the only reason AFRICOM would respond with precise and proportional force. There is a regional military security presence but pacifying Somalia has not been successful for decades and no peacekeepers have yet received adequate commitment. The WFP and UNSCOM have skillfully raised money without any peacekeeping corruption so far, but they have encountered well-spoken resistance by Al-Shabaab. The UN has not committed any money to the needed military presence at this time. AFRICOM is the most financially solvent armed force for Somali nation-building.

So far AFRICOM has not received permission to deploy by any African nation. Protecting UN food convoys presents an excellent way to win the hearts of the people through their stomachs and establish a permanent base on the African Continent. Somalia-US relations have been strained since military conflict was attempted in the 1980s. To prevent any more futile warlike behavior AFRICOM’s mission to Somalia must be clearly defined as humanitarian assistance under the authority of the Secretary of State rather than the Commander-in-Chief, whose only African campaign so far has been to skillfully shoot a Somali pirate and free hostages, which is not fertile ground for feeding 3.5 million people for six months. To make the separation of military and civilian power clear to the Head of State the humanitarian mission shall be paid for with regular military appropriations and all their non-security taxes, corporate and payroll, and weapons importation duties, shall be paid to Somali Customs, to allow Somalia to account for immigrants, and importation of arms, the Secretary of State to account for this money as International Assistance to Somalia by the Department of Commerce and Official Development Assistance (ODA) by the United Nations. Foreign military finance is limited to $3 million by law and the rest of these taxes, maybe around $10-100 million, must be civilian. The exact size of military presence needed in Somalia is unknown. Its cost to the US military could run from $50-$250 million. This should be financed in the medium term by foreign US military base closures in other continents where there is a surplus. It is too early to close the AFRICOM base in Germany on the security of Somalia alone that might again exile us. To finance a long and fruitful humanitarian mission USAID should be allocated $250 million annually for Somalia. Wherefore the Deepwater Horizon settlement closes WFP/UNHCR 2011 $1 billion, USAID/Somalia 2011-2014 $1 billion, FEMA 2011-2012 +/-$10 billion and BP 2011 +/-$10 billion.

Work Cited

Gollust, David. Clinton Appeals to al-Shabaab for Food Aid. Voice of America. August 4, 2011

Ham, Carter F. Statement to the House Armed Services Committee. United States Africa Command. 5 April 2011

Humanitarian and civic assistance provided in conjunction with military operations 10USCAI(20)§401

National Hazardous Substance Response Plan 42USC(103)I§9605

Oil Pollution Act of 1990 33USC(40)§2718

Sanders, Tony J. Care Pakistain: The Seeds of Flood Relief. Hospitals & Asylums HA-21-8-10

Sanders, Tony J. Empirical US Foreign Assistance Statistics at the Close of the American Imperial Century: An Act to Secure a Voluntary 1 percent ODA Tax on Income HA-31-9-10

Sanders, Tony J. Flood and Tornado Insurance from the Deepwater Horizon Overpayment. Hospitals & Asylums HA-16-5-11

Straziuso, David. Somalia Drought Spreads As Fighters Warn Of Militant Cruelty. Huffington Post. Mogadishu, Somalia. August 3, 2011

World Food Programme. Horn of Africa: 10 Ways You Can Help. 22 July 2011; community@wfp.org,

United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Addendum to UNHCR’s Response to the Somali displacement crisis into Ethiopa, Djibouti and Kenya: Somalia, 2011. Donor Relations and Resource Mobilization Service. July 2011