Drought Plus Anarchy Equals Famine

Via Andrew Sullivan, Edward Carr on the developing famine in Somalia:

After reading a lot of news and blog posts on the situation in the Horn of Africa, I feel the need to make something clear: the drought in the Horn of Africa is not the cause of the famine we are seeing take shape in southern Somalia. We are being pounded by a narrative of this famine that more or less points to the failure of seasonal rains as its cause . . . which I see as a horrible abdication of responsibility for the human causes of this tragedy.

Famine stops at the Somali border. I assure you this is not a political manipulation of the data – it is the data we have. Basically, the people without a functional state and collapsing markets are being hit much harder than their counterparts in Ethiopia and Kenya, even though everyone is affected by the same bad rains, and the livelihoods of those in Somalia are not all that different than those across the borders in Ethiopia and Kenya. Rainfall is not the controlling variable for this differential outcome, because rainfall is not really variable across these borders where Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia meet.

Yo, libertarians, what's your answer on this one? Where the government is powerful and cares about the people, we don't have famines. Yes, I know that the worst famines of the 20th century were created by governments, but the answer is not to abolish government -- that's what they did in Somalia, and look where that got them. The answer is good government. Or even mediocre government, like what most of the world outside Africa has right now.