The United Nations has called an emergency meeting to discuss the Horn of Africa drought, which it says has already claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Famine was declared in two regions of Somalia on Wednesday where 3.7 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.
Another 8,000,000 people need food assistance in neighboring countries including Kenya and Ethiopia. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls the situation a "catastrophic combination of conflict, high food prices, and drought" and has appealed for immediate aid.
Democracy Now! goes to Nairobi to get an update from Kiki Gbeho of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
This is followed by a follow-up discussion with Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.
This was predicted long ago by people on the ground," Parenti explains. “It’s a combination of war, climate change, and very bad policy, particularly an embrace of radical free market policies by regional governments that mean the withdrawal of support for pastoralists, the type of people you saw with their dead cattle."
The United Nations has called an emergency meeting to discuss the Horn of Africa drought, which it says has already claimed tens of thousands of lives.