Star One Smart Blog's

From Drudge this morning.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, in an article published Saturday.

"The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change," Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column.

UN statistics showed that rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, he said, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons.

"This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming," the South Korean diplomat wrote.

"It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought," Ban said in the Washington daily.

Yes, there is a drought, and whether or not that drought is caused by human activity is a major question.

What is not questioned is the fact the the Sudan's population has grown 11 million since 1993, from 25 to estimated 36 millions. Does this not have anything to do with the violence and killings, Ki-moon? Sudan is a small country, relatively speaking, and has a population that's doubled since 1980. Does anyone notice this?

Yes! The UN noticed (well, at least one man, IHEU Main Representative Roy Brown, spoke shortly to the Human Rights Council, last December, on the population issue.) Here's what M. Brown had to say:

Mr President,

The International Humanist and Ethical Union has been active with other non-governmental organizations in raising the issue of Darfur since early 2004. We therefore welcome this Special Session. We would first like to associate ourselves with the statement by the British ambassador that we need clear, accurate and impartial information prepared by independent and respected observers. The full cooperation of the government of Sudan will be necessary to give the mission a free hand to visit widely in the region.

We do not wish to refer further to the overwhelming evidence of continuing, massive and systematic human rights abuse in Darfur. Instead, we would like to step back from the appalling evidence of day to day atrocities and draw the attention of the Council to an aspect of the conflict that seems to have been overlooked.

In 1990, the National Population Committee and the Department of Statistics put Sudan's birthrate at 50 births per 1,000 and the death rate at 19 per 1,000, for a rate of increase of 3.1 percent per year. This compares with the average for developing countries of 2.1 percent per annum, and makes Sudan's population one of the fastest growing in the world. Darfur is no exception to the rest of Sudan; its population has doubled since 1980.

The conflict between pastoralists and herders over scarce resources is not unique to Darfur. It arises whenever population grows faster than the available resources. In this connection a report published today by NASA [1] speaks of an unprecedented loss of water from the continent - an annual net loss due to changing rainfall patterns, levels of consumption and climate change equivalent to the consumption of more than 300 million people.

We ask all parties concerned in seeking long term solutions to this conflict to take account of the impact of increasing population pressure on competition for resources, and to include in their work consideration of how best this problem might be addressed. We suggest that the UN Population Fund could play a key role here.

According to UN data, if current trends continue the population of Africa as a whole will double in the next 35 years. Darfur has probably given us merely a foretaste of conflicts to come. If the international community fails to solve the problem of Darfur, what hope is there for Africa? What hope for Humanity?

Thank you.

Well-spoken, Mr. Brown. Too bad you aren't riding the political horse of Global Warming, spurred on by Al Gore and his hidden anti-capitalist agenda. Too bad your reasoned and correct analysis didn't make it to the ear of Ki-moon, or to headlines on Drudge.

Too bad you're not the UN Secretary General...

Powered by ScribeFire.