Article published June 11, 2008
Food costs rise, people starve, and tyrants rule
THE SUBJECT of food in the world never stops coming up and never reaches stasis, largely because it is a complex issue.
It received its most recent gnawing over at a meeting last week in Rome organized by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The only profit to come from the Rome meeting was the attention it brought to the subject.
Here is the basic problem. Rises in the price of food around the world brought about for the most part by the rising cost of fuel are landing on the heads of the people least able to pay for food. The cost of staples such as rice go up; people's wages or earnings from production don't go up. They go hungry.
The rising cost of fuel also has caused some crops that are grown for food now to be grown for fuel, thus creating shortages and higher prices for those crops.
In a world market for food, a large part of what is grown needs to be transported, and those costs are up because fuel prices are up. Thus, again, food costs more, and unless someone has the good fortune to be living in a petroleum-producing country with a decent distribution of wealth, the poorest - again - get whacked.
It gets worse. There is no way to argue that there isn't a moral aspect to hunger. I will try to make that argument, but I am sure I will find myself dragged onto the volcanic moral terrain of Jonathan Swift's famous mock proposition in 1729 that the way to deal with hunger in Ireland was to eat the starving babies. Here is, nonetheless, the argument.Food prices have always gone up. There will always be a time lag as world food production increases to catch up with rising prices, and, in the supply-and-demand cycle, pushes food prices back down. This price volatility, by the way, is the argument that U.S. farmers use to try to justify the American taxpayers continuing to pay subsidies to them even as agricultural prices go through the roof.
If this means that more babies in Africa or Asia die of hunger in the short run, in the long run their parents will in principle catch on that they can feed only so many of them and, in response, will perhaps have fewer of them, and the supply of and demand for food will eventually even out, solving the problem.
But to take that point of view is to cut counter to what one would have to say are the best instincts of not only Americans, but people everywhere. We start from the truly ugly fact Americans' most serious health problems stem from the high percentage of us who are obese or overweight. As a result, we suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, and guilt, all of which can be made less lethal by eating less. And then there is the impact of rising health-care costs - which result in no small part from obesity - on our economy.
It is also the case that, heaven forbid, we are a people with a heart. It bothers us to be aware that there are millions of little children who are hungry, who are suffering from all the awful effects of malnutrition. It is fortunate that we are a people who still care, who don't just stop reading about such things or change channels to avoid looking at them, although donor fatigue has long ago set in.
There is another truly evil aspect to this problem. That is that many of those starving are starving because they live under governments headed by people who don't care. The meeting in Rome last week brought this phenomenon to the fore by including the participation of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe.
Zimbabwe used to be a major food producer. When I lived in the Congo, much of the corn that was the staple food in the mining region was exported as surplus by Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe. Under Mr. Mugabe's rule, Zimbabwe's economy lies "tits-up in a ditch," to use Annie Proulx's expression.
Four million Zimbabweans, one-third of the population, are now dependent on outside food aid to live. Europeans will not allow Mr. Mugabe to travel to their countries.
But it isn't part of U.N. rules to exclude officials of any member country from a meeting such as last week's food summit. So Mr. Mugabe was there, trying to sink his fangs into the hands of those who would seek to feed his suffering people.
The ghastly question that presents itself with someone like Mr. Mugabe and countries like Myanmar is, does one punish the miserable people of the country with, for example, economic sanctions because their leaders are so rotten?
The argument, then, for doing so says, if the people of a country get hungry enough, and angry enough, they will go the way of the French in 1789 and in the face of "Can't they eat cake?" chop off the evil leaders' heads.
But it doesn't usually work that way. Instead, the people continue to suffer, becoming weaker and less able to resist a vicious government.
Those outside may derive some satisfaction from punishing the country in question, but in the end little is changed.
The U.S. Navy ships full of relief supplies for the people of Myanmar sail away, as they did last Thursday, refused access to the suffering population by the vicious generals who rule the country, but the generals stay in power and the people continue to suffer and die.
I don't know the answer, especially for the United States in 2008. It wouldn't take much U.S. military force to get rid of Mr. Mugabe in Zimbabwe or to block off the generals in Myanmar from the stricken area, but we have no excess military capacity. If we weren't in Iraq, it is conceivable that America could lead the international community in putting an end to the ability of Mr. Mugabe and the Myanmar generals to torment their populations.
But not now. So we probably just have to watch, powerless, and seek other ways to feed the hungry.
Dan Simpson, a retired diplomat, is a member of the editorial boards of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Permanent Link
|
|
 |
|
Search
advertisement
