In Somalia, the first shipment of food was delivered Wednesday to Mogadishu, the first shipment since the official declaration of a famine just over a week ago. But the U.N. said it cannot get aid to more than two million people who are unable to flee the country’s south – territories controlled by rebels linked to al Qaeda and where some of the most desperate can be found.
Many of the refugees find their way to the Dadaab camp in Kenya, the world’s largest refugee camp, housing some 380,000 people – nearly four times its intended capacity. Close to 11 million children and families are suffering from the effects of the worst drought in 60 years. Thousands are fleeing Somalia on foot, leaving behind a nation plagued by malnutrition, disease and poverty.
Aevia — Consider the Source

An unfortunate mix of drought, failed harvests and rising food prices have brought severe food shortages to the east and the Horn of Africa. The severe food crisis is already affecting around 10 million people in parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia. Rains have failed over two seasons, with a strong La Niña event having a dramatic impact across the east coast of Africa. Now that this year’s wet season has officially ended, there is little prospect of rain or relief before September.
Charities have launched the biggest ever campaigns to tackle what they call a ‘creeping disaster’ in Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia. For Somali refugees arriving in neighbouring Ethiopia, rates of severe malnutrition are as high as 23%, according to Oxfam. A 4% incidence normally constitutes an emergency.
Up to 1,000 Somalis a day are also streaming across the Kenyan border to Dadaab, already the largest refugee settlement in the world, with 367,000 residents. Some 2.5 million people require food aid in Somalia, but access is tough, particularly in the south, where an Islamist insurgency has made it nearly impossible, for aid groups to operate. To the west, in Ethiopia, 3.2 million people require humanitarian assistance. Pastoralist communities there have seen 80% of their livestock die in some places, according to Oxfam, with the lost income making it extremely difficult for people to buy food.
In Uganda 600,000 people need assistance, and in Djibouti 120,000. But the greatest number of people in need, 3.5 million, are in Kenya’s arid northern regions, whose marginalisation by the government has magnified the effects of the increasingly frequent droughts. In Turkana malnutrition rates are more than twice the emergency level.
“High food prices, fluctuating rainfall, a rising population and ever dwindling natural resources have created the perfect storm,” said Leigh Daynes, director of communications for Plan, in the UK.
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Managing the Mautam

The predator satiation hypothesis holds that by fruiting at the same time, a plant population increases the survival rate of their seeds by flooding the area with fruit so that even if predators eat their fill, there will still be seeds left over. Certain species of bamboo, for instance, have a flowering cycle longer than the lifespan of their rodent predators. Bamboos can thus regulate animal populations by causing starvation during the period between flowering events.
The problem for humans in such a case is one of collateral damage. The entire world population of the bamboo species Melocanna Baccifera blossoms just about every 48 years. This blossoming bamboo produces fruit that has a large seed. Forest rats feed on the seeds. The rats then reproduce at an accelerated rate. Once the nocturnal rats have stripped the landscape of bamboo fruit, they devour other growing and stored crops including grains, potatoes, maize, chili, and sesame. The rodents can gnaw through the floors and walls of granaries and other storage containers. According to The Times of India, the flowering of 1958-59 caused a famine that killed as many as 15,000 people.
During the next cycle in 2008, the number of actual casualties was greatly reduced. A combination of harvesting the bamboo, shooting the rats and staging relief supplies in a timely way had the effect of mitigating starvation. There was, of course, hunger in the most remote areas. But not on the scale seen during the 1958-59 famine. The near famine conditions that did occur were largely attributed to political corruption and the for-profit seizure of relief supplies intended for potential victims of the “flowering famine.”
The areas of Northeast India (primarily in Mizoram and Manipur States) as well as regions of Burma (mainly Chin State) and Bangladesh (Hill Tracts) that normally suffer from an overpopulation of rats were, for the most part, spared the worst of it. Could it have been managed better? Sure. Are there lessons to be learned? Certainly. But warding off famine is far better than trying to locate starving individuals in the wake of it.

— by Bob Kalk

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The cricket ball-sized flowers have sprouted along entire lengths of bamboo stalks to produce a huge volume of seeds that attract thousands of rats, which feed on them as they are very nutritious, say agriculture and forest experts.
And the flowers are threatening to create a famine, a phenomenon the district has witnessed every 50 years due to the cyclical flowering. Previous recorded famines were in 1862, 1911 and 1958-62.
Agricultural experts said the marauding army of rats, which multiply quickly, eventually turn to paddy, potato plants and grain in granaries, leading to famine or ‘mautam’, the name given to the phenomenon in Mizoram which literally means “death of bamboo”.AEVIA Reveals the Source

Nearly 500,000 Indian farmers are facing the prospect of famine as a plague of rats that strikes once every 50 years threatens to destroy their crops, rice paddies and village granaries. Efforts to control the rodent plague in the north east Indian state of Mizoram have led the local government to offer a reward of one rupee (1.2 pence) for every rat tail delivered to the authorities. More than 400,000 rats have already been killed, creating piles of tails, which have to be counted by officials before reward money can be disbursed to the catchers.
The rat plague occurs once every 50 years in Mizoram – a tiny state of 900,000 people squeezed between India’s borders with Bangladesh and Burma. It is linked to the flowering of a rare species of bamboo, the Mautam or melocanna baccifera. It flowers all together, dropping millions of protein-rich seeds that are devoured by the rats, causing a population explosion. When the seed supply is exhausted, the rats move to crops and granaries.
AEVIA Reveals the Source