Canada,(insidesomalia.org)-We have a navy. What better use for it than fighting pirates? Canada has an opportunity to play a hero on the world stage, and hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake.

For North Vancouver's Denise Brown, deputy director of UN World Food Program (WFP) operations for Somalia, piracy threatens a people already on "a descent into the abyss." Troops from the weak Somali government and U.S.-backed Ethiopia are battling Islamic militias.

The fighting has killed an estimated 6,500 Somali civilians since 2007, and driven hundreds of thousands of people, including half Mogadishu's population, from their homes.

Warfare, drought and skyrocketing food prices have joined in a hellish convergence, with 2.4 million people in need of emergency food aid.

"The next step is famine, catastrophic famine," Brown says.

Piracy may push Somalia to that next step and plunge the country to the bottom of the abyss -- a place where babies starve to death in their mothers' arms and skeletal children die in the dust.

So far this year, Somali pirates have attacked 25 vessels, compared to 31 incidents in all of last year.

The escalation parallels the increasingly chaotic warfare and lawlessness in the country, with the violence spilling over to the ocean.

Any romance attached to the notion of piracy has long since sunk to the bottom of the sea. Gone is the swashbuckling swordplay aboard sailing ships. Today's pirate travels by speedboat and carries a rocket-launcher on his shoulder, instead of a parrot.

He kidnaps for ransom, he steals food from the hungry and seizes anything else of value he can get his hands on.

After pirates attacked three ships delivering food for the WFP, the UN in November began receiving naval escorts from Denmark, then Holland, to safeguard the deliveries from Kenya to Somalia.

No attacks occurred while the WFP-contracted ships were escorted. But the Dutch pulled out a month ago.

Though so far the deliveries have escaped piracy, a single attack on the now-unescorted vessels could frighten shipping companies enough that none would be willing to bring food in, says WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon: "We could see similar scenes to the 1992-93 famine, in which hundreds of thousands of people perished." Now, with nearly a million Somalis displaced from their homes, pastures and subsistence farms, and 90 per cent of the food aid arriving by ship, a moral imperative faces the developed world: We must help more.

Canada has already given $5 million this year in food aid to Somalia. Earlier this summer, Canadian warships took part in anti-pirate patrols off the Somali coast.

It's becoming disgraceful that no nation is stepping up to provide protection for food deliveries in this humanitarian emergency.

Canada has the naval power. It's time to use it.