No wonder the situation is allowed to go on and on with no resolution.
"Sudan... is already growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian army."
All U.S. ALLIES!!!!!!!!!!
So the agenda-pushing AmeriKan just likes to flog the Sudanese issue when appropriate for what?
Distraction? Guilt trip? Because it is an acceptable, unacceptable genocide?
And how come I never heard much of the Sudanese Holocaust in my War Dailies (as well as this article)?
Amazing, aren't they, at what they hide and selectively report, isn't it?
"Darfur withers as Sudan sells food" by Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times News Service | August 10, 2008
ED DAMER, Sudan - Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat.
Yeah, well, Fighting For Food
In the bone-dry desert, where desiccated donkey carcasses line the road, huge green fields suddenly materialize. Beans. Wheat. Sorghum. Melons. Peanuts. Pumpkins. Eggplant. It is all grown here, part of an ambitious government plan for Sudanese self-sufficiency, creating giant mechanized farms that rise out of the sand like mirages.
But how much of this bonanza is getting back to the hungry Sudanese, like the 2.5 million driven into camps in Darfur? And why is a country that exports so many of its own crops receiving more free food than anywhere else in the world, especially when the Sudanese government is blamed for creating the crisis in the first place?
So when does the article on the Palestinian suffering at Israel's hands come out, NYT?
African countries that rely on donated food usually cannot produce enough on their own. Somalia, Ethiopia, Niger, and Zimbabwe are all recent examples of how war, natural disasters or gross mismanagement can cut deep into food production, pushing millions of people to the brink of starvation.
Almost as if it were some sort of "plan," huh?
But in Sudan, there seem to be plenty of calories to go around. The country is already growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian army. Now the government is plowing $5 billion into new agribusiness projects, many of them to produce food for export.
Take sorghum, a staple of the Sudanese diet, typically eaten in flat, spongy bread. Last year, the US government, as part of its response to the emergency in Darfur, shipped in 283,000 tons of sorghum, at high cost, from as far away as Houston. Oddly enough, that is about the same amount that Sudan exported, according to UN officials.
Translation: Sudan is a LAUNDERER for the U.S.!!!!
This year, Sudanese companies, including many that are linked to the government in Khartoum, are on track to ship out twice that amount, even as the United Nations is being forced to cut rations to Darfur.
Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in the United States and an outspoken activist who has written frequently on the Darfur crisis, called this anomaly "one of the least reported and most scandalous features of the Khartoum regime's domestic policies." It was emblematic, he said, of the Sudanese government's strategy to manipulate "national wealth and power to further enrich itself and its cronies, while the marginalized regions of the country suffer from terrible poverty."
USA!!USA!!USA!!!
Sudanese are just like ALL GOVERNMENTS!!!!!
Aid groups gave up long ago on the Sudanese government helping the people of Darfur. After all, the nation's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has been accused of masterminding genocide in Darfur. UN officials have said that if they do not bring food into the region, the government surely will not.
That leaves the United Nations and Western aid groups feeding more than 3 million residents of Darfur. But the lifeline is fraying. Security is deteriorating. Aid trucks are getting hijacked nearly every day and deliveries are being made less and less frequently. The result: less food and soaring malnutrition rates, particularly among children.
As with the hunger and the Ethiopian kids dying (see list of todays posts) that is SELDOM MENTIONED in the AmeriKan MSM.
On top of this is the broader problem of trying to find affordable grains on the world market when prices are higher than they have been in decades. UN officials in Sudan say that the fact that they have to import some of the same commodities that Sudan not only produces but exports is a source of constant frustration.
"Sudan could be self-sufficient," said Kenro Oshidari, the director of the UN World Food Program in Sudan. "It does have the potential to be the breadbasket of Africa."
Sudanese officials say that is precisely their goal, and they deny that Sudanese agribusiness is being built at the expense of their own people. They reject accusations that they are neglecting far-flung areas like Darfur, much less waging a war of hunger and deprivation against them.
Now does that ever sound like Amerika!!!!
Instead, Sudanese officials say they are simply trying to build up their economy. They say they know what it is like to be vilified, having been squeezed by American sanctions for more than a decade.
And it could get worse, with Bashir facing genocide charges at the International Criminal Court in connection with the massacres in Darfur."Nothing about the 2 MILLION DEAD in the north-south fighting, huh?
Just one more one-day wonder from the BG.
I guess I should be grateful they ran the piece at all.
