The Root Causes of the Somali Famine

THE 21st century has brought with it tremendous technological progress, but allied with predatory capitalism, has offered selective benefits.

Extreme rich-poor divides bedevil most developing countries that provide raw materials for this technology, and in failed states such as the DRC and Somalia, poverty has only deepened.

This century has also seen some of our worst natural disasters; many brought on about by the combined forces of man and nature. In Pakistan, 20 million people were directly affected by the floods of September last year.

Rampant deforestation of the Indus highlands could not absorb the heavy rainfall and an unseasonal early snow melt, which resulted in huge volumes of water gushing into the Pakistan lowlands.

Even in the Far East one has to ask how much less the impact of the Indonesian tsunami could have been had the mangrove swamps not been destroyed to build beachfront hotels?

And now in the Horn of Africa, 20 million Somalis are being affected by famine and drought. It’s alarming to think that in less than 12 months, 40 million people in the poorest parts of the world have been displaced by environmental disaster.

However, to understand these disasters we have to look at them in a wider context. This is because they are inevitably the consequence of more complex happenings. Global warming is a scientifically recognised phenomenon, but that doesn’t help us to understand the social, human perspective.

Science only deals with actions in a box called a paradigm, and can only look at events relating to that paradigm via a laboratory benchmark. To understand global warming and the Somali famine, man (and not science) has to be placed at the centre of things.

Our perspective is historical, because it is history that sheds the most light on causation. The truism is: nothing on this earth happens in isolation, and everything is inter-connected – from the strands of human thought over the ages to the dust of the Western Sahara blowing across the Atlantic.

The Somali famine, the symptom of a greater social and environmental mechanism, has its distant roots in the Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries; religious wars that witnessed hundreds of thousands of people dying, and Mamluk armies finally driving the Franks back to Europe by 1290.

This encounter with the Islamic Orient – then the world leader in the arts, sciences, economics, music, medicine and philosophy – saw the birth of the European Renaissance.

And whilst life in the Sahel continued as before, and the universities of Timbuktu still produced some of the world’s finest scholars, events were already stirring that would begin to affect sub-Saharan Africa in unimaginable ways.

The Knights Templar of Jerusalem, the forefathers of modern Western banking and the Masonic movement, brought many ideas back home. Scholars such as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon drank deeply from Islamic sources, but not before many of the Templars – in a mediaval sub-plot – had been executed by King Philip of France on Friday 13, 1307.

The adoption of the scientific method caused conflict with the church. Its leaders saw themselves as direct heavenly intermediaries. The idea of reason being superior to revelation was not only an anathema to them, but a threat to their political and economic grip on power.

Medieval scientists such as Galileo clashed with ecclesiastical authorities, and the rise of the Catholic Inquisitions in the 13th and the 16th centuries ensured that doctrinal tyranny reigned supreme. This in turn engendered a reaction against the church, with science often at odds with clerical authority.

This separation of science and religion is described by the late Maulana Fazlur Rahman Ansari as the “tragedy” of Western civilisation. Western civilisation was the “child” of Islam. But, as he says, it was a “disloyal child” as its progress, except for technology, was hostile to the moral direction that Revelation could give it.

This dichotomy became epitomised by the injunction of giving unto “Caesar what was due to Caesar and to God what was due to God”. With religion – and more importantly, its morality – divorced from economics, government and knowledge, it was a slippery slope to rampant materialism.

This materialism was accelerated by the Industrial Revolution that stirred in the late 18th century due to the invention of the steam engine. The iron and steel, textile, agriculture and transport industries were revolutionised overnight.

With the rise of industry and its need for workers and finance, it also heralded the era of “bankism”, the predatory exploitation of interest.

The urbanisation of Europe had begun, often accompanied by the discontent of the poor, who found life in the city largely dehumanising. Poor living conditions, low wages and exploitation dogged their existence, nothing new in terms of urbanisation today.

But what really changed the human landscape was the means of production. Mass production needed energy and that energy came from coal that pumped smoke and toxins into the air. London, for example, became infamous for its pea-soup smog.

It does not take rocket science to realise that from here on in, the global environment was never going to be the same again – and as technology got smarter, and its by-products messier, the destruction of everything around us just picked up speed. With his machines, man was now master of all he surveyed – without due consideration.

The advent of colonialism in the 19th century merely accelerated this process worldwide. To say that Africa was its worst victim is an understatement, if not a cliché. Already seen as a rich harvesting ground for slaves, the continent became the primary source of the developed world’s raw materials.

And whilst some of our ills in Africa are self-inflicted, it’s fair to say that the effects of climate change – due to the industrial revolution – are not. Indeed, the story of Africa is that the poorest of the world's poor are its worst victims.

Of course, the Somali situation has not been helped by the fact that it has been a failed state for 20 years. But its chronic underdevelopment is equally the result of colonial meddling and international fudging.

The calamity of starvation and disease in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel has been only added to by institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. Niger suffered a famine in 2006 after the IMF instructed the government to sell off its food reserves to service its loan.

But in Somalia, as children perish like flies from preventable diseases, the ongoing disaster is that people are dying of thirst above water aquifers. But the biggest tragedy, by far, is that those who contributed most to this crisis on the edge of the world’s largest growing desert will probably never pay back their debt.