An ‘America First’ Approach to Famine
The peak of humanitarian funding to Somalia came in 2022, when the Biden administration (with Congress’s approval) spent more than $2 billion to prevent a catastrophic famine that FEWS Net said was possible.
Key points
- sent millions of dollars’ worth of food to Yemen—a country that is partly ruled by a terrorist group whose motto includes the phrase “Death to America”—after FEWS Net warned about the potential for a famine there.
- The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, created by President Ronald Reagan’s administration, can forecast hunger emergencies months in advance; whenever FEWS Net has assessed a credible risk of famine, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have sent food and basic medicines overseas to try to minimize deaths.
- has historically acted on it, even when the people who are threatened live in nations hostile to America.
Back in May, FEWS Net started indicating a credible risk that famine could occur in certain regions of Somalia by the end of this year.
Right now, that system is warning about the rising possibility of famine in Somalia.
Additional details
- Earth, the brothers predicted in their best-selling book, Famine—1975!
- In this world order, the United States could be as great as Athens or Byzantium—if the government could let go of what the Paddocks called “this brand-new obligation to feed the world’s hungry.” The brothers’ projections, luckily, turned out to be exceptionally wrong.
- Somalis—most of whom are goat, sheep, and camel herders—can’t expect help from their government, which is corrupt and devotes most of its small budget to fighting al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s Somali affiliate.
- Floodwaters could drown crops and animals, and make it much harder for the humanitarian workers who remain in Somalia to reach the tens of thousands of people living in displacement camps, some of whom would likely begin starving to death.
- The Trump administration has said that it paused funding because in January, the Somali government, while in the process of redeveloping a port area, had destroyed a warehouse that contained 83 tons of fortified foods partly paid for by the United States.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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