Arms Money Would Be Better Used to Aid Africa

Re Davan Maharaj’s article “Living on Pennies: Trading Tomorrow to Eat to Day,” July 12: What was conspicuously missing was how well the 10 million people affected by the 2002-2003 droughts coped with the ensuing famine.

The ingenuity of the individual farmers in planting enset, the false banana tree, the decision of the Ethiopian government to put in place an early-warning system and disaster-preparedness mechanism well ahead of time and the swift response of the international community dispatching food to the drought-affected areas have saved millions of lives.

The reason for the recurrences of drought and famine in Ethiopia is not as heedlessly alluded to by a fellow Nigerian and quoted by the writer. The main causes are persistent natural calamities, years of degradation of soil, poor rural infrastructure, limited natural resources management, absence of financial services to help farmers in using modern farming techniques and shortage of food-storage facilities.

Taye Atske-Selassie

Consul General

of Ethiopia

Los Angeles

The billions of dollars that are being poured into Iraq for no legitimate reasons could be of so much more value if sent to the people of Africa who are starving to death, dying of disease, living under such deplorable conditions.

Don’t we have our priorities all wrong when waging war is more important than relieving human suffering? Where are the leaders who can face this problem and make a powerful effort to alleviate the suffering of fellow human beings?

Evelyn Katz

Los Angeles

Having just read the first three installments of your series on Africa, I am deeply saddened by the suffering and early death of fellow human beings in that part of the world.

But I am also angry. In a world where we spend billions on armaments to kill each other, it is amoral that we cannot find enough money to feed people. And the irony of this is that many of those who are suffering could feed themselves if they weren’t being driven off their land by these same armaments.

We need a new paradigm in which human needs are considered more important than the profits of the big corporations. We also need people who will question where these enormous sums of money are going.

We certainly are not going to find such representation in the U.S. Congress, where less than a month ago the senators voted unanimously for this obscene amount of money in the 2005 budget.

Jeanne Whitesell

Huntington Beach