Who Cares? (# humanitarian crises in the world greater than ever before)

[G_j]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4993510-110800,00.html

Who cares?

The number of humanitarian crises in the world is greater than ever before but most go unreported in Western media. Sophie Arie in Rome and Jason Burke reveal the extent of the suffering - and the nightmare facing aid agencies

Sophie Arie in Rome and Jason Burke
Sunday August 15, 2004

The Observer

In the dusty valleys of Sumdoh, where the villages barely cling to the steep slopes of the high peaks of the Indian Himalayas, where winter temperatures drop to -30C, and where the frost splinters roads into rubble in months, they are waiting. High above, behind the crags that rim their desolate valley homes, is a lake. Old shepherds remember it as an oversized pond, but now it is a huge reservoir, swollen with the glacial melt caused by global warming, waiting to smash its way down the valley and out to the plains beyond.

Last week, with the lake higher than ever, the Indian government began the laborious process of evacuating 12,000 villagers. The operation was carefully co-ordinated from the hill town of Simla. Chief Minister Vir Bhadr Singh reviewed the situation and said the government must prepare for the worst. But many thousands remain in the danger zone.

Few outside India have heard about the crisis. This is not unusual. Across the world tens of millions of people are at risk from famine, disease and natural disasters, without anyone taking much notice. In Gujarat, in western India, 300,000 farmers have had their fields flooded; droughts have hit Sri Lanka, there are floods and landslides in Brazil and Haiti.

Nor are the villagers of Sumdoh exaggerating the problems. When a lake flooded in the Caucasus in 2002 it destroyed a village 15 miles down stream, killing 100 people. Researchers at the United Nations Environment Programme have identified at least 44 potentially dangerous glacial lakes in the tiny Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan alone.

..more.. :-(

[opihimoimoi]

1. Hummers are on sale, Hummers are on sale, see Tony, come

on down to Paul's Auto's, see Tony or anyone of his able staff to assist you in choosing one for you.

No one cares what happens outside of their front yard, much less around the World....

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. C'mon. It's not like it's a sex scanal involving an athlete.

Or, the need to ask people in Florida who lost their trailers interesting questions like, "How do you feel about losing your trailer?"

We all know that Americans much prefer bread and circuses to anything that would disrupt their purchasing power.

[G_j]

3. 800 million people in the world who do not have enough to eat

<snip>
Senior WFP officials believe four major factors are causing the crisis. The first is that global warming is causing problems of a severity that has never been seen before. The rise in global temperatures - reckoned to be more than half a degree centigrade over the past year - has melted glaciers throughout the world, causing landslips, mudslides, flash floods and the swollen lakes that threaten Sumdoh. Warmer temperatures mean more evaporation which means more precipitation which means more flooding. WFP officials point to the recent floods in Bangladesh - the worst for six years - as an example of the sort of climate-related crisis they increasingly face.

<snip>
'We are facing a major problem of priorities,' said John Powell, the WFP's deputy executive director. 'The international community has great concern that we keep capacity in Iraq for the next couple of months. But at the same time, there are tens of millions of people who don't know where their next meal is coming from. We don't seem to be able to engender the same degree of concern for many other places in the world.'

Powell said press coverage is critical. 'The media is an indispensable ingredient in the recipe for success,' he said. 'But it's a fact that there are disasters which are less prominent. Altogether there are 800 million people in the world who do not have enough to eat each and every day. And nobody talks about it or writes about it.'

<snip>

[Deja Q]

4. I'm going to send that URL to the Thank Tony page...

http://www.thankyoutony.com/

[G_j]

6. never saw that one..

:puke:

[Hidebo]

5. nobody cares

business as usual

[G_j]

7. kick

[Selwynn]

8. I care. :(