Talk:Calls for aid to help feed millions, as East Africa plunges into drought

The tone of this article implies that this is a POV story. "Poor infrastructure" and other items are OK, as long as they are quotes and attributed to a person. However, this article needs a lot of cleanup as it skips what agencies said what, and ignores (if available) responses from the Kenyan government. --MrMiscellanious (talk) – 23:30, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

NPOV: Lack of food or lack of equality in food distribution mechanisms?

It may sound obvious that when there's a lack of food, people are going to die.

But it's also obvious, that when there's a lack of food in one place and you're obliged to sell the little food you do have for export, or if the government is not allowed to give people food at low or zero cost, or if the governments of neighbouring countries are not allowed to give free food across the border, then these extra factors, together with the original lack of food, are what kill people.

Another way of putting it: i, and 95% or so of people living in rich countries, do not personally produce the food we eat. In a strict sense, we have zero food productivity. So why don't we starve? Because there's some sort of food distribution system.

Anyway, that's just my own summary. It's not original research. Amartya Sen, who got the Nobel memorial prize in economics for other work, is one of the people who did detailed empirical analysis, including the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famines of 1973 and 1974, the Bangladesh famine of 1974, and the famines in the countries of the African Sahel in the 1970s: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0198284632/toc.html

i agree with MrMiscellanious (for once :), that what is missing here is info from people in Kenya etc. about what possibilities there are for food distribution, whether there are IMF or WTO bans making it illegal for the government to give out free food, how much food supplies are available in neighbouring countries and whether there is market pressure or legal constraints or whatever making it illegal to give food to the starving people.

Distribution of information is extremely important for the distribution of food - a quote from Amartya Sen is No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.

i seem to remember someone writing about the Kenyan constitution, so there should be Kenyan people around who can provide us with more local information - and for whom wikinews could (in principle) help in circulating information in the East African region and maybe make food distribution happen properly so that people don't die. i realise that, strictly speaking, this could be borderline on advocacy: in principle, wikinews has no intention to try to stop people from dying, except in the sense that we want to distribute NPOV information, and that we agree that in general, distributing NPOV information is likely, in the long term, to have good socio-political effects (such as stopping people from dying of hunger). Boud 00:49, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

• No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. hmm. I wonder how many of those there are .. I think the sample size is too small to be statistically significant. -- Simeon 05:19, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Back to cleanup, development

There is no reasoning or backup for the claim of "war" (mentioned in opening) being a factor of the starvation (nor does it correctly attribute the claim to an organization, a must). This article is still too POV without attributions of sources who make such claims, and is very bare on specifics. This may be too broad of a subject for a news article; try dividing up into sections about specific regions and events and grouping them up into one large article. --MrMiscellanious (talk) – 03:59, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree, now that I have started researching it, that the story is large and the scope makes it hard to identify simple factors as causes, I guess we should just try to get some quotes with attribution from people who may have good understanding. I think I improved it a little, and one of the source links I added talks about the war -- didn't have time to read it. I only dug up links from Kenya so far, there are four more countries full of media for us to scrounge through. ;)

This is a very important story, and one that I haven't heard mentioned on local media here, so someone please work on it!

I tried to publish it because I think we should publish a short version ASAP to get more interest so that we can in fact publish more detail. So please look over the current state and see what minimum can be done if it still needs work, to make a short item? I think what is there now can very quickly be made NPOV even if it means leaving out some bits, then people can research the detail and publish in subsequent articles. -- Simeon 04:25, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

• To fix structure, I propose we arrange the paragraphs like so:

-- How many affected, how severely and where (attributed to those calling for aid, who include Pres of Kenya, FOA, UN, probably heads of other govts as well).

-- Possibly reasons why - immediate resource problems, where and when etc

-- Possible reasons why, political, ie why did the resource probs come about, who blames who, etc.

...

-- Simeon 04:43, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

why remove amartya sen's and yves engler's comments?

i don't understand why simeon has removed the references to w:Amartya Sen and w:Yves Engler. Their work is not my original research - these are externally referenced sources.

If the IMF has allegedly had a role in killing millions of people, why is it the role of wikinews to hide this claim? NPOV is to say the claim is there, not to hide it. Boud 01:08, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Since i see no response in 24 hours, neither POV nor NPOV, i will put back the NPOV relevant information in the article. Boud 00:14, 11 January 2006 (UTC)