It has been with growing disgust that I have been reading about the famine in Niger, which threatens to kill hundreds of thousands of people. That nation suffered a long delay in its annual rains, followed by a plague of locusts, and then got the rains when it was too late to do anything but make life more miserable. In many regions, food is effectively gone, and people are dying quickly.

This is sad, you say, but the developed world is responding to the crisis, right? In fact, we are responding at a snail's pace, and food aid is trickling in, not flooding in, to only some of the affected areas.

But this caught us by surprise, right? In fact, various governments and agencies have been getting told for months that this was coming, but were ignored. They even suggested an emergency diversion of the anti-poverty program funds to provide food but were turned down.

It gets worse. The reason the locusts appeared was because the weather was so dry, changing the life cycle of the grasshoppers to become locusts. This was known and local aid workers recommended an emergency locust suppression program before they matured and started to migrate (spraying from the air.) This would have cost 10 to 15 million dollars so they were turned down. Given estimates that 200,000 to 300,000 people may well die as a result of that decision, that means one citizen of Niger is not worth $50.00.

Combine this with the situations in Sudan (Darfur), the Congo and Somalia, and the past record in places like Rwanda, Liberia and Uganda, and you have to wonder if (Sub-Saharan) Africans are perceived as being truly human or just some clever species of monkey by the powers-that-be. The only horror stories from Africa I get in the news are from Zimbabwe, where the local madman was boorish enough to steal farms from white people.

Please tell me I'm being overly pessimistic, but it really does seem to me that we have decided to ignore most of an entire continent, as long as it doesn't bother us too much. It takes a lot of revolting TV footage to get a reaction, which by that time comes much too late.

However, our governments aren't completely indifferent....
Recently the people in the g7 conference discussed debt forgiveness for a large number of African nations, at least it is a step in the right direction...

The debt forgiveness was needed soon anyway on simple book-keeping terms, as it was becoming evident that the money was never going to be paid back and it was interfering with daily business and trade. The G7 did what you're supposed to do with bad debts: wrote them off, but under the guise of aid.

The true point will be whether the next few years sees a difference in approach at increased funding levels, or just more of the same. Europe is a definite maybe, while North America and developed Asia both look highly doubtful.

right.....

We basically have two options. We go in and oust any oppressive dictators if we are going to really try to help the people of Africa. Or we cut all funding to countries with oppressive regimes in charge.

Africa has had most of its problems escalate due to the main problem with socialism/globalism. The explosion of AIDs is an example of how people give up doing anything to better themselves when they have been suckling the teat of socialist handouts for so long.

Our money spent on any of this is useless if it is not utilized properly by people living in freedom.

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Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness ~Thomas Paine

the countries ravaged by civil wars and just reemerging as a stable nation like Angola? What about the countries ruined by Western economic colonialism like Zambia? I don't think you can attribute their problems to evil dictators and socialism (as if socialism ever caused any economic downturns ).

I agree with you on the subject of handouts. The only type of material aid that is in any way effective in the long term is aid to businesses, not individuals. We must stimulate their economies, and make them able to buy their OWN food, make their OWN clothes, generate their OWN electricity, and do it all for themselves. I mentioned Zambia earlier. We have been shipping so much clothes to Africa that the Zambian textile business (once thriving) is now nonexistent. Everyone has AC/DC and Metallica T-shirts donated from places like the Salvation Army. We must be smarter in the ways we aid those people, and not cause more harm than good like we are doing now.

The money that is sent to them year after year is the process of redistributing wealth and we haven't seen it do much good over there. Hasn't solved anything.

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Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness ~Thomas Paine

They've been using it in the wrong way. As I said before, the only way to put a country back on the right track is to invest in or donate to its businesses. You give clothes to the people, they will not buy them from the local clothes store, hurting the economy. You give food, agriculture shuts down (unless there really IS a shortage of food). We have been ruining the African countries through bank loans and humanitarian aid used in the wrong way.