Byron Dorgan: “in the Washington Post this week there was an article entitled ``Sudan's Famine Overwhelms Aid Effort.'' I want to read…”

“in the Washington Post this week there was an article entitled ``Sudan's Famine Overwhelms Aid Effort.'' I want to read a couple of sentences from this article, because I was struck by the concurrence of what I read about what is happening in Sudan and what I know is happening in North Dakota and in much of the farm belt. As the gate is about to close for the night on the feeding center here, near-lifeless bodies start turning up everywhere. Three have collapsed just outside the reed walls of the compound, human skeletons so thin they look two-dimensional against the ground. Three, then four, then five, then, somehow, eight others have been carried inside and laid among the swarm of gaunt people still strong enough to beckon medical workers who have spent the day ministering to the hundreds gathered outside this place that has food. The workers move from body to body, feeling for a pulse, crumbling high-calorie biscuits into palms, pouring sugar water from gourd to mouth. The impossibly sunken cheeks of a man too weak to hold his head up by himself fall deeper into his face as he slurps. . . . Four months after aid agencies issued warnings of impending famine in southern Sudan--and two months after they marshaled public opinion in the name of heading it off--starvation has arrived regardless. Across a vast region unsettled by civil war and erratic weather, the United Nations now says, 1.2 million people are at risk of death from hunger.…”