Currently viewing the tag: "famine"

Below is a round-up of recent news analysis and media commentary from the WPF’s Executive Director, Alex de Waal, a leading expert on mass starvation and famine. In the past weeks, he has discussed starvation crimes in Gaza (Occupied Palestinian Territories), Sudan, Tigray (Ethiopia) and the Horn of Africa.

Gaza

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The basic charitable impulse is food for the hungry, a bed for the night for the homeless, protection from violence for the vulnerable and scared. For half a century, as the humanitarian international has become bigger, more professional, and more effective, aid givers have also been imbued with a general sense that the world is […]

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Between 1958 and 1961, the people of China suffered the greatest famine on record. Perhaps 36 million people perished. Astonishingly, this famine was concealed from the world and only became known more than 20 years later.

The Article 19 Report on famine and censorship, Starving in Silence, published in 1990, had one section on […]

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The people of Gaza are facing a real prospect of famine. That is the warning of the Famine Review Committee, an independent international mechanism. Without immediate action—stopping the destruction of items indispensable to human survival and providing large-scale relief and essential services—mass mortality from hunger or disease outbreaks is looming.

This blog post puts the […]

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The social meaning of famine is to be found in memory.

A just-published special issue of Third World Quarterly on famine and memory, includes contributions on Bengal (India), Biafra (Nigeria),

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From the Nigerian people to scholars, and even Nigerian government officials, the Nigerian government is often described as an elite cartel focused on dividing up the immense oil spoils. Oil has historically accounted for 65 – 85 percent of government revenues, but what happens when the oil money dries up?

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