Somalia was in the news for decades now, not for what it used to be or for what it can be but for being a basket case or a failed state, which required a drip-feed of humanitarian aid to survive. From an economic point of view, this is lethal. It ignored the fact that Somalia has the longest and most resource-rich coast of mainland Africa, where tuna, snapper and lobster thrive in its waters. It ignored that the country has one of the largest arable lands and one of the largest livestock populations in the African continent. 

But one only sees images of starving children in Somalia and massive trawlers from thousands of miles away, such as Spain, South Korea, Japan, India, and even from closer quarters  from Yemen, Iran, and the UAE, unregulated and unpunished, harvesting away the riches of the country and millions of United States Dollars’ worth of protein from Somali waters every year. This is not a story of a people who cannot fish. It is a story of a people whose oceans are being looted while they are handed a tin of foreign-processed sardines as  food aid, and whose leaders apparently, for some unexplainable reasons, seem to be enjoying, as well.

The same story exists on the vast lands of Somalia, which support an incredibly large livestock population supplying the Gulf countries on the hoof, millions of sheep and goats, camels and cattle annually. No one mentions that the Somali pastoralist is a master of one of the harshest environments on earth, possessing ancestorial knowledge of migration, seasons, water management and animal husbandry in general, which far exceeds the so-called expertise of foreign consultants. When rains fail or even before they fail, as they naturally do in cycles, they do not........

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