Hunger in Guinea-Bissau

Uma amiga italiana com quem troco selos, a Lisa, escreveu-me preocupada, depois de ter lido na imprensa italiana as declarações de Ramos Horta, alertando para a situação de crise alimentar na Guiné-Bissau, e sabendo do meu interesse pelo país. Depois de me pedir para lhe explicar em poucas palavras a situação (disse que tentara pesquisar na internet, «mas não tinha percebido nada») terminava, ao despedir-se, desejando boa sorte aos guineenses.

Transcrevo aqui a minha resposta, em inglês, que é a língua que utilizamos para nos correspondermos.

And thanks for your wishes for Guinea-Bissau. Italy contributed greatly in the end of the 70's and early 80's with aid to the country. People want to start again there, in one of the poorest countries in the world: we have many qualified people around the world and we will show the example to Africa, as we already did, only with Argelia in Africa, liberating ourselves from colonialism. What Selassie did not acheive (alone, without foreign help) with Mussolini. Now we need trust from around the world, against the neo-colonialist campaign that the portuguese gouvernment is leading, acting as Guinea-Bissau remains a colony. Maybe, as philatelist, you know the name of Guinea-Bissau, but you can not see it at first view in the globe, between Senegal and another Guinea (ex-french), and there are not many people knowing the name... People in Guinea feel some times forgotten by the world (only 3h flight from Lisbon). But believe that GB is a beautiful country, asfixiated and blocked by Portugal and European Union since more than one year (not only cutted all the humanitarian help but also created obstacles to incipient local economy), under political alegations of coup d'etat (no blood - and it was not a coup, but a counter-coup that ousted a traitor conspirating with alien military forces, that after being hold, was released by humanitarian reasons). People feed great hopes to the momentum, but because of the political blocus and a bad cotation year, the kashew campaign (financing basic rice for 2/3 of families - Census 2010) was really bad (producer couldn't get more than 1/3 last year prices per Kg) ; increasing the problems, all imported goods are scarce and out of price, from milk powder for children (it's not nice, with so much EU milk excedent, to condemn bissau-guinean children) to gasoline pricing more than 2€/L...