generalspeaking

Fixed Priorities

While the United Nations World Food Program expresses its disappointment at the lacklustre response of developed nations in pledging billions of dollars to eradicate world hunger, those very developed nations are themselves struggling to pull themselves out of a perilous economic situation, to put themselves back on a solid financial footing. Yes, it is important for wealthy countries to spare as generous amounts of their nation's treasuries as they can to help the world's less fortunate.

Some of the world's less fortunates also live in many first-world countries, a fact not to be overlooked. With millions of people living in the United States, for example, the wealthiest, most advanced country of the world, in absolute poverty. And where, in a social-minded country like Canada, an unacceptable percentage of the nation's children must avail themselves of food banks to ensure they have sufficient food. Internal needs are at least as pressing for these countries as those presenting overseas.

The United Nations estimates there are roughly one billion undernourished people worldwide. And they are not taking into account people living in desperate conditions in developed countries. They speak of people living in Democratic Republic of Congo, in Bangladesh, in Burma, in North Korea, in China, in India, in Egypt, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, in Zimbabwe, in Pakistan, in Sudan, and other unfortunate corners of the world where life is hard. In most of those places it is their governments that fail to provide for their people.

Many of these are countries ruled by despots, by administrations far more interested in buying arms than feeding their people. More intent on lining their own pockets than seeing that their populations are housed, fed, educated and given medical treatment. Which is no reason why the developed countries should sit back and consign those populations to their ill fate, to be sure. But even in those oppressive environments people can be self empowered to help themselves.

They can discreetly be given modest means by which they can fend for themselves, in some instances. They can be encouraged to become independent, to avail themselves of any, even the merest opportunities to take advantage of. Offering modest wherewithals to encourage independence. Feeding people discourages anything but dependence, and it feeds a cycle of hopelessness. And ongoing, generational despair and dependence. Whose agenda does that serve?

But helping people to help themselves can offer dignity and self-availment. It's been done in a small way by offering women minuscule amounts of money as loans to set up modest cottage industries. It's been done by offering small sums of money to help villages drill wells. To help farmers to cultivate very small plots of land that can produce just enough to help people survive and have a little left over to help others of their community.

The head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization is perfectly correct when he points out that the world spends a horribly inordinate amount of its capital on munitions, while at the same time finding it difficult to collectively amass a sum of $44-billion the UN asks for, to help feed that one billion on the verge of starvation. That is a huge whack of money, but there are many generous nations of the world that could, if pressed, raise that sum.

On the other hand, look at the situation from the perspective of the Animal Kingdom. Nature provides climatic and growing boom-and-bust years. In the good years where food foraging due to weather and growing conditions being favourable, animals of the forest live well and their populations expand. In the poor-producing years, animal reproduction contracts to match food availability.

Animals do not grow their own food; they rely on the bounty of nature at its best to provide. Human beings, also animals, have the capability to tweak nature to help them grow the food they need to survive. To do so they need the initiative and the tools and the weather conditions, not all of which are available when they're required. But at least two of those conditions can be met.

On the other hand, another arm of the United Nations, the UN Population Fund, goes to great lengths to point out that unfettered human population growth is also linked to environmental degradation and climate change. "Slower population growth ... would help build social resilience to climate change's impacts and would contribute to a reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions in the future."

Are they advocating withholding food from starving populations? Not quite; what they see for the future is a program for the empowerment of women, as they put it. Teaching women to contribute through fertility control, and by involvement in their local economies. Seems we've already visited that vision, and it's been successful where it has taken hold.

But try selling that message of fertility control and more female involvement in the politics and social economics of some countries and watch the orthodox component of the religious rear up their heads and roar about imperialist interference. Those countries of the world where hunger is at its meanest are invariably patriarchal, as are most countries of the world. Many of them are also diabolically theocratic regimes.

Back to the drawing board. Human beings are so devilishly skilled at cutting off their own noses...

Labels: Environment, Human Rights, Political Realities, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, November 19, 2009