Opinion: The great scandal of 2011

The papers are full of the phone hacking scandal and the sickness it has revealed at the heart of our national life. But there's a bigger scandal this month - a scandal that has already taken thousands of lives. It's the famine in East Africa. Climate change has been a present reality in East Africa for at least ten years. Animals have died and their herders been forced off their lands in great numbers. It was always inevitable that the local combination of climate change and political incompetence would create a famine - now it has.

If the world's nations had wanted the UN could have prevented this - or at least prepared to feed the starving when the time came. Yet once again neither prevention nor preparation was done and relief depends on the ad hoc generosity of nations and individuals. The nations were too busy fighting wars, kowtowing to corporations or just twiddling their collective thumbs.

It is, truly, shameful.


David Flint, August 2011