Ishmael
JF-Expert Member
- Oct 18, 2011
- 15,039
- 6,017
[h=3]Additional Options[/h]
Instability and famine in Somalia
What the past few hundred years have taught us is that without stability and peace there is a pretty dim prospect for any kind of development: economic, human or social.
Likewise poverty thrives in times of conflict and unrest. What is typical of Somalia, like the other Least Developed Countries (LDCs), is precisely the extreme poverty its population lives in.
Conflicts & limited resources
So when food prices go up, as it did recently (by 300%), the poor have no way on earth to buy food.
To help with that, conflicts, warlords and clans in Somalia make it more difficult to distribute whatever resources and food the country has.
Each clan will obviously seek to keep as much for itself as possible, unless a compromise or agreement is made with another clan. But as youre about to see, compromises are rare and famine in Somalia is only getting worse.
[h=2]Clans and scarce resources[/h]Clan identity & fighting for resources...
Since the collapse of the last Somali government in 1991, most of the fights have been over resources such as land and water. Basically the most fundamental resources to survive. Tribes and clans have re-emerged as the form of social and political order and over time the situation has proved not as violent as depicted in many movies, especially in comparison to other countries. Clans are now the last type of safety net for many Somalis.
... And aggravating poverty and famine in Somalia
The problem is that clan identity has become a resource for political power. Whoever can claim to represent a clan would have the right to claim some local power with the resources that go with it. This way, ethnic minorities are taken advantage of when new clans pretend to represent them just to strengthen their power. Minorities are then even more marginalized than before and get even less resources to begin with water and food than the rest of the population. This makes delivering aid to the right people terribly more complicated.
In other cases, ethnic minorities are not organized in any clan whatsoever and thus they can be simply kicked out of any resourceful land by whatever clan that comes by. This means more clashes, more victims and refugees, more destitution and bigger famines. The clan organization of Somalia works to some extent as a social order but it's by no means a way to redistribute resources with a minimum of equality.
[h=2]The World Bank, the IMF and the famine in Somalia[/h]
