2.5 million people

in Northern Kenya are facing starvation. Both the long rains and the short rains failed last year. Livestock have died from lack of food and water, wells have run dry.

Wangaari Maathai, Kenyan Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist, attributes the drought and famine partly to deforestation. The British began the stripping of Kenya's native forest cover to create arable land. It continued post-independence, when all African countries were told that cash-crop production for export was the road to self-sufficiency.

Now the land is desert. World markets for coffee, tea, cocoa, tobacco, sisal, have plummeted. The world wonders why Africans can't get it together to feed themselves.