"man-made food scarcity: policies spending trillions to kill, forcing millions to riot for rice"
This week’s front pages carried compelling issues: women ex-contractors giving evidence of sexual abuse at the hand of U.S. soldiers and other contractors in Iraq; a nuclear plant explosion in volatile Pakistan; a 200,000-annual job loss in the United States; a presidential gift of 12-month tours to soldiers while prolonging U.S tyranny in Iraq; Israel’s (and proxy’s) continued attacks on Gaza and stepped-up militarist provocation against Lebanon; U.S. vigil of lies attempting five years later the to justify overthrow of a sovereign nation and its president and the killing, wounding and displacing of hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s people; and China news: overdue protests in a world gorging itself on China-made commodities, reactionary put downs of protests, and convenient claims by the Tiananmen Square murderers that “terrorists” are threatening their August Olympic Games―Compelling indeed.
But what stirs my deepest outrage this week is man-made food scarcity: policies spending trillions to kill, forcing millions to riot for rice.
The United Nations World Food Programme repeated this week what it has said for years. But the situation has worsened. The world’s peoples in the midst of war and conflict, upheaval and poverty are in deep humanitarian crisis. Those suffering most are not the creators of crisis but leaders of rich nations playing investment games, flirting with biofuels, pandering to one or another corporate constituency; manufacturing suffering, rendering people incapable of buying or bartering milk or maize. Denying food, particularly denying people the means to grow their own food, to feed themselves sufficiently, then to import if they choose constitutes denial of life. That to me is the greatest crime. As food prices rose to historic highs throughout the world, the poorest among the world’s Western people―forced to eat dirt paddies laced with vegetable oil and salt and threatened by UN peacekeepers’ rubber bullets, assault vehicles and tear gas―stormed the palace at Port-au-Prince.
“High food prices have created an urgent situation throughout many developing countries,” the executive director of the UN World Food Programme reported in March of this year. Global stocks of food are at historic lows, the supply globally at about 50 days, and food prices have been increasing aggressively to historic highs. She outlined four causal factors in the food crisis: rise in oil and energy prices, India, China and others’ economic boom, harsh and frequent climate variations, and increased biofuels production. All are largely, or in substantial part, founded on Western governments’ economic and labor decisions and foreign policy (or defense) and trade decisions.
Who suffers food crises most and where?
When food and fuel prices double or triple, countries at greatest risk are those disproportionately importing, already pressed with inflation, having to spend disproportionately on food needs, are at war or in conflict, and/or are subjected to climate-changing effects such as drought, flooding, cyclones.
Sufferers are countries that have been invaded or exploited or whose militaries, juntas or government leaders have been manipulated, used or abused by outside governments. Countries suffer when―instead of rich countries’ aiding with cooperative programs amending colonial pasts and helping people plant and secure their own food―international organizations and institutions (religious, state, corporate and intergovernmental) rob the people and rape their land while proliferating themselves: inflating their salaries and investments; and handing out what’s left: “charity aid” to “the poor” they themselves have caused, created and perpetuated. People are suffering in Africa (Egypt, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Cameroon); the Americas (Haiti, Cuba, Bolivia); and Asia (Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines ,Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Bangladesh, India)
Suffering sub-continental trio: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh: Though all three countries are in conflict and Pakistan and India are believed to have nuclear weapons as powerful as the weapon used by the United States to destroy Hiroshima and the U.S. government is currently working on a deal that would give India access to U.S. nuclear fuel and equipment for the first time in 30 years even though India has consistently refused to join nonproliferation agreements, India and Pakistan are in food crisis.
As India operates under an onerous caste or class system, hundreds of thousands of Indians languish in poverty. India’s historic record shows that though its “highly planned economy has made remarkable economic strides" since independence “from the exploitative economic system imposed by British colonial rule, it remains among the world's poorer nations in per capita gross national product, and a large fraction of the population continues to live below the poverty line, fixed according to the amount of income required to maintain a minimally adequate diet.”
Current news reports show that India’s inflation rate jumped in March to its highest in four years; and “a combination of high oil and fuel prices, rising demand for food in Asia, the use of farmland and crops for biofuels, bad weather and speculation on futures markets have pushed up food prices, prompting violent protests in a handful of poor states.”
Pakistan is said to fare somewhat better, “[resembling] middle-income countries of East and Southeast Asia more than poor nations of the Indian subcontinent.” But “there has been a relentless increase in population, so that, despite a real growth in the economy, output per capita has risen slowly.”
Bangladesh is overwhelmingly agricultural―three-fifths of its people so engaged. And as it is wholly dependent on monsoonal changes (heavy rainfall), poor monsoons mean poor harvests and threat of famine.
Suffering Latin America, Caribbean Haiti: More than 52 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean, 10 percent of the region's population, suffer from malnutrition or hunger. At the same time this region is “the biggest exporter of food on the planet. This means the main cause of under-nutrition in Latin America and the Caribbean is not a lack of food-production capacity but poor distribution of and access to food. It’s like waitressing in a restaurant where you can’t afford to eat or servicing a plane too costly for you to fly.
Agriculture also dominates Haiti’s economy―farmers concentrating on cassava (manioc), plantains and bananas, corn (maize), yams and sweet potatoes, and rice; foodstuffs sold in rural markets and along roads. But a fifth of the food consumed in Haiti is imported, and imports have lowered overall food prices, thereby further impoverishing struggling farmers and compelling more people to migrate to urban areas. Some four-fifths of its population lives in absolute poverty. A few multinational corporations are active in the country. But Haiti’s limited resource base has been depleted, first through intensive colonial exploitation and later through unplanned development and corruption.
But despite humongously catastrophic humanitarian crises in Asia, Africa and Latin America, rich nations continuously ply poorer nations with bombs instead of the means cooperatively to support their own healthy, long-term human existence. As the world’s people suffer for want of basic, unadorned subsistence, powerful nations' policies and practices play to the worst in people, weaken them, exploit them, and kill them.
“We are hungry!” Haitians exploded in personal and principled outrage this week as food prices soared This is criminal. The world knows prices have been rising sharply and everybody knows that the most vulnerable people are always the hardest hit. Ultimate cruelty consists in causing or letting people die or forcing them to the indignity of begging for food. Hunan beings understand the outrage that drives human beings―though in the line of UN fire from assault vehicles, tear gas and bullets―to storm the presidential palace at Port-au-Prince shouting “We are hungry!” demanding that the president "must go!”
Sources:
Guardian “Food price rises threaten global security: UN” http://www.guardian.co.uk./environment.2008/aor/09/food.unitednations/ “Food riots can spread, high prices set to continue: FAO “http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/india-news/food-riots “Freeing Latin America and the Caribbean from hunger” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: http://www.fao.org/newsroom. “India-Pakistan nuclear war would cause ozone hole” Reuters April 7, 2008: http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis“2 Die in Pakistan nuclear plant accident” Associated Press April 8, 2008: http://ap.google.com/articleBritannica 2007 Standard Edition
“What global price rises mean for WFP” World Food Programme March and April 2008: http://www.wfp.org/englishHaitians storm president’s palace” Al Jazeera April 9, 2008: http://english.aljazeera.net/News
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April 16, 2008 HTTP://JOURNALS.AOL.COM/CWRITER85/TODAYSMISSINGNEWS. Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett, Writer, Independent journalist, Educator. Author of Women's Work and Words Altering World Order published 2008 by iUniverse. Hardback ISBN 978-0-595-70449-1; paperback ISBN 978-0-595-46712-9. To order call 1-800-authors or go to http://www.iuniverse.com.
