The western media’s focus on events at home like the US elections and the UK Brexit referendum has come at the expense of reporting on the famine that’s unfolding in Africa.
In Ethiopia, the US pushes the diffusion of individual freedoms and China jockeys for collective economic betterment. Both the US and China could lose out if chaos spreads in the Horn of Africa.
The Crimea crisis has focused our attention on the vexed question of Europe’s energy supplies. To a great extent Europe depends on Russia for its oil and gas, which gives Vladimir Putin disproportionate…
We need to stop thinking about food security as an economic problem. Food security is largely discussed in terms of increasing demand pressures and worsening constraints on supply. These discussions miss…
2010 was the world’s hottest year on record, with global temperatures 0.53°C above the long-term (1961-1990) average. 2011 started with a strong La Niña (perhaps the strongest since 1917), something which…
While droughts are caused by weather – the failure of the rains – famines are invariably political. The current famine in southern Somalia should have come as no surprise. Aid agencies have been warning…
With the UN declaring famine in Somalia for the first time since 1992, and other countries in the Horn of Africa suffering critical food shortages, this already unstable region is facing devastation. Drought-stricken…
Senior Research Fellow, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Visiting Professor University of Buckingham, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs