Mom was right.

Winding down for what I belived to be a productive day of newsgathering, I began aimlessing flipping through the hundreds of channels I pay a premium for and binge-eating at lightning speed when a singluar number on a graphic of a news channel forced me to put the remote and the fork down.

I took a breath; a chill going right through me.

“An estimated 29,000 children under the age of five dead in the last three months.” The cause: starvation.

Anderson Cooper reporting from Kenya, in the famine zone. It’s food, or lack there of, for thought.

When you clicked on one of the 3, 172..3, 4 articles in the Kim Kardashian wedding and the hundreds of thousands he spent of a dress or cake…did you think of how many people that would feed in Africa?

When you mom nagged you about not finishing the peas did you stop and say, “hey that”s right!” I didn’t.

Let’s do it now.

Watch it:

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/08/cooper-this-famine-was-preventable/

Read it:

Somalia: A very man-made disaster

By Alex Perry, TIME

The difference between a drought and a famine is down to man. Texas is in the middle of its worst drought on record right now but cowboys aren’t starving – because Texas, and the US, have government and economy enough to ensure they don’t. Somalia doesn’t have any government worthy of the name and that’s one reason why persistent drought has pushed around 3 million Somalis in the south of the country close to starvation.

The difference between ungoverned Somalia and its better-governed neighbors, Ethiopia and Kenya, is starkly visible on a map: on one side of the border, famine; on the other hunger, and a refugee crisis, but no mass starvation. As Nancy Lindborg, co-ordinating the U.S. response to the famine, says: “If you ever needed a strong case for the need for democratic inclusive government…”

But Somalia’s famine is also about the lack of something else: a decent aid operation. There are three reasons the emergency effort to save starving Somalis is falling tragically short.

First, the UN was late calling it. The Famine Early Warnings Systems Network first warned of a hunger crisis last September, and that in a situation the UN has already labelled the worst humanitarian situation on earth for years. But it wasn’t until July 20 that the UN began an appeal, and called a famine. Given debt crises in Europe and the US, it is hardly surprising the UN found it could not instantly raise the $2.48 bln it said it needed. Funding today has reached just 55% of that total, “dangerously inadequate” said British International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell yesterday after visiting Mogadishu for a few hours.

Second, Western aid agencies aren’t reaching many of the starving. Some, incredibly, are pretending they are. Oxfam is one agency raising money for Somalia and claiming to be reaching hundreds of thousands when, as a spokesman admitted to TIME, it doesn’t actually distribute food and has no staff in the famine area. Less disingenuous agencies will admit the emergency operation is not going well. The UN says a mere 20% of the 2.8 million southern Somalis in need are being reached.

The World Food Program, the big player in global famine relief, is reaching even less than that proportion among the 500,000 refugees in Mogadishu, largely because of security concerns. Nearly all Western aid workers stay on a sand-bagged, razor-wired base on the beach attached to Mogadishu airport that, sealed off from the city and patrolled by armed guards, is effectively hardly part of Somalia at all. Rarely do they venture out. WFP does send out 85,000 pre-cooked hot meals every day for distribution through local charities. But stopping mass starvation requires mass food delivery and no one has attempted that since the WFP’s one attempt at bulk distribution in early August ended in a riot and seven deaths. Three weeks after the UN declared a famine, refugees I talked to in a camp just 200 meters from the airport had yet to be fed.

Third, southern Somalia is loosely controled by an al Qaeda-allied guerrilla group, al Shabab. The U.S. listed al Shabab as an international terrorist group in 2008, a designation fully justified by its killing of 76 civilians in twin suicide bombings in Kampala, Uganda, in July 2010. Delivering food aid is a dirty business, rife with pilfering, and like governments and aid contractors, al Shabab used to steal a proportion of the food that was delivered to its areas, either to eat itself or sell in the market. But with al Shabab’s listing, US aid officials and any aid worker handling US food suddenly had a legal obligation to ensure none of benefitted al Shabab, even inadvertently. The way they dealt with that was to suspend most aid to southern Somalia by the end of 2009. Al Shabab then added its own block by banning WFP, which it accused of being a U.S. puppet, from its territory in January 2010.