Let's broaden our gaze

For at least a couple of years, a perfect storm has been unleashed in some areas of the planet.
Who sees plague, war and hunger acting together. Or rather, the thirst that in turn causes hunger, plague and wars.
Let's start with the plague, in the form of the Covid pandemic which has all the dramatic consequences in terms of health, closures and blocks of trade that impoverish territories already marked by poverty.

Then there's the war – 168 are being fought in the world, although it seems to be fought only in Ukraine – which has a strong impact on the prices of fuel and fertilizers which have skyrocketed dragging down food prices. And finally hunger, a consequence of the plague, war and climate change that have caused drought for years.
Hunger caused by a long thirst especially in some large areas of Africa. To which the CEI in Matera, during the National Eucharistic Congress, decided on a double allocation from the 8xmille funds.
This is 2 million euros for the agro-pastoral communities of the Sahel and the great Horn of Africa and 4.4 million euros for the populations of India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Kenya , realities in which wars, natural disasters and pandemics have triggered or exacerbated humanitarian difficulties. The interventions in the Sahel and in the Horn of Africa are aimed at strengthening livelihoods and guaranteeing food and nutritional security, especially for children under the age of five, pregnant or breastfeeding women; to ensure water supply and conservation systems; to support agriculture and breeding; to promote health and peace.
“This allocation – underlined Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, archbishop of Bologna and president of the CEI – carries a profound message: we can never think of ourselves as islands.
The southern hemisphere is not something distant, which does not concern us. The people who live there and who find themselves in difficulty due to catastrophes also caused by our selfishness are our sisters and brothers. Only if we broaden our gaze beyond our "I" can we perceive ourselves as children of the one God, family, all brothers".

So let's take a closer look at the situation in the Horn, one of the poorest areas in the world, where drought caused by climate change has caused four crops to be lost, adding to the atrocities and damages of the civil war in northern Ethiopia involving troops from Addis Ababa and Eritrean allies since November 2020.
A little further south, in Somalia, a civil war has been fought for 30 years and a quarter of the country is controlled by the Islamist terrorists of Al Shabaab who would like to transform the Horn into an emirate. According to UN humanitarian agencies, 30 million people in this area are at risk of a serious food emergency and more than half - 16.2 million - have no access to water for drinking, cooking, washing and irrigation. The water crisis affects 8.2 million in Ethiopia, 3.9 million in Somalia and 4.1 million in Kenya, according to UNICEF.

What does it mean beyond the numbers? That in Somalia and Ethiopia the temperatures undergo constant increases as happened in Italy last summer, moreover in many coastal areas for months an anomalous and very strong wind has been blowing (110 km/h) which sweeps away the clouds and dries up plants, vegetables and wells. Many wells in the oases have dried up and are now salinized.
It is impossible for humans and animals to drink sea-like water.
Those who drink unsafe water risk fatal diseases such as dysentery – especially for pregnant women – and those who use it to wash themselves risk skin and eye infections because drinking water is divided. But drinking water is on sale in Somalia, it is not a public good, and its price has increased by 71% in one year, unsustainable in one of the ten poorest countries on earth.

Food prices are also soaring, with inflation at 70% in these drought-affected areas due to poor harvests and Ukraine's grain crisis. Families struggle more and more to eat and drink every day and water causes or exacerbates local conflicts between settled farmers and nomadic pastoralists, more than ever fighting for survival. All this in the bureaucratic language of global health is called malnutrition and has affected millions of people.

How does it come out? Mainly with humanitarian aid, those that ended up in Ukraine instead of the Horn. The funds are finished, it is necessary to provide.
But above all, investments in smart, agile technologies are needed, which make it possible to use solar energy to move ever deeper wells excavating machines, to intercept groundwater and drip sprinklers to save water by saving local crops such as dates and bananas which can be resold on the markets. This would help the people of the Horn of Africa start to recover.
Naturally, it is not enough, we need to fight the evil of war, which is raging in the Horn, the Sahel and Asia at the behest of medium-sized foreign powers such as those of the Gulf and Turkey and large ones, such as the USA, Russia and China, increasingly interested in increasing their respective spheres of influence over Africa and its resources. Above all wars that sell weapons, big business that knows no crisis in these years of recession. To fight wars, hunger and plague, one must choose peace, invest in everything that opposes war.
Invest in development. The mad climate and the war are two stimuli that men of good will at all levels must grasp, it is necessary to invest against thirst to try to stop the perfect storm that is killing millions of people in the indifference of the world.

Paul Lambruschi
NPFOCUS - Our home
N.P. October 2022