A deadly famine caused by greed, corruption and injustice

The withered faces of children with skull like heads and emaciated bodies is the image of starving Niger where 3.5 million people are facing death.

A child dies every five seconds in Africa, soon it could be every three. Instead of rain they got global warming and the drought turned fertile fields to arid desert. The scattered bones of animals give rise to the greatest fear of all - famine, mass starvation; we can help prevent it.

Locusts devoured the grass and every leaf, consuming the livestock's last remaining resource. There is no food, no water refugees stagger across the baked earth, not knowing where to go. Dysentery and disease ravage the weak; children are the first to die, then their despairing parents.

In Niger the earth is culling the weak and the poor. Some arrive in camps where the food from a rich world arrives too little and too late. The children can't ingest a single spoonful.

A BBC camera crew seemed distracted. Before them another baby died, then another - they found a human disaster beyond reason and description. Then they did what they do best, they showed the world what all must hear and see. The camera takes the baby's wrinkled face, old and out of tears and records the silent pain of a dying child - no energy left to cry - just an open mouthed grimace, eyes wide and staring. It's death by hunger, corruption, uncaring greed, ignorance, and injustice for this impoverished people in a land starving in a world of obscene wealth.

They need their voice, a Mandela, of a prophet, a poet crying from their wilderness to tell the leaders the healing must begin and they must give no cause for hatred and revenge. Imagine the feelings of the rich leaders if they heard the poet say:

"We could have fed ourselves and survive this famine but you took away our freedom and enslaved us with unjust loans, you tool all we had as interest and left us with dry bones.

"You left us with corrupted leaders, your dearest friends and g