Year of the Hungry

Despite the West's pledge to halve world hunger, the number of people who are short of food will soon reach a shocking landmark.

Year of The Hungry: 1,000,000,000 Afflicted
by Asavari Honavar

One billion people will go hungry around the globe next year for the first time in human history, as the international financial crisis deepens, the United Nations has told The Independent on Sunday.

The shocking landmark will be passed - despite a second record worldwide harvest in a row - because people are becoming too destitute to buy the food that is produced.

Decades of progress in reducing hunger are being abruptly reversed, dealing a devastating blow to a pledge by world leaders eight years ago to cut it in half by 2015.

Rich countries have failed to provide promised money to boost agriculture in the Third World; the financial crisis is starving developing countries of credit and driving their people into greater poverty, and food aid to the starving is expected to begin drying up next month.

Development charities recently called on US president-elect Barack Obama to put the escalating food crisis "front and centre" of his priorities.

Some 963 million people are now undernourished worldwide, according to the most recent survey of the crisis by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and the UN body expects the situation to worsen with the recession. "The number will rise steadily next year," an FAO spokesman told the IoS last week. "We are looking at a billion people. That is clear." The FAO fears the tally will go on increasing for years to come.

This directly contradicts an undertaking by the world's leaders at a special summit in September 2000 to "reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger" from 1990 levels by 2015, as part of an ambitious set of Millennium Development Goals.

At the time, and for several years afterwards, the goal looked achievable, if challenging. Between 1990 and 2005 the number of undernourished people stayed more or less the same at between 800 and 850 million, even though world population grew by 1.2 billion, meaning that the proportion of a rapidly increasing humanity that went hungry was steadily falling.

Several countries - including Ghana, Peru, Mexico, Chile, Jamaica and Costa Rica - actually exceeded the target years ahead of time, while others such as Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Mozambique were on track to achieve it. Twenty-five developing nations looked as if they would be able to halve the absolute number of their hungry - not just the proportion of them in their rising populations - by the target date.

But over the past three years that progress has been thrown abruptly into reverse, with the first steep and sustained rise in hunger in decades leaving another 115 million people short of food. The increase began when prosperity was still increasing and has continued despite bumper harvests; a new FAO report shows that this year's grain crop is set to grow by 5.4 per cent to 2,241 million tons, following a 6 per cent rise last year - ahead of population growth.

So the growth in hunger is not occurring, as in the past, because of shortage of food - but because people cannot afford to buy it even when it is plentiful. The main reason has been that high food prices have priced the poor out of the market.

Over the 12 months until last summer, wheat and maize prices more than doubled and rice prices more than tripled. This was due partly to the growth in biofuels which, the FAO reports, has taken over 100 million tons of cereals out of food supplies over the past year to fuel cars instead. One fill of a 4x4's tank uses enough grain to feed one poor person for a year.

The organisation also blames speculation, population growth, the shrinking of food stocks to record lows and the increasing consumption of meat in developing countries such as China and India, which mops up grain supplies because they are used to feed livestock.

International prices have fallen sharply since the summer, as this year's good harvest has further swelled supplies and the growing financial crisis has cut demand. But the FAO reports that the lower prices have failed to ease the crisis, while the increasing financial turmoil has made it worse.

Developing countries have not benefited from the falling worldwide cost of food, it says, because their currencies have depreciated against the dollar in which international prices are set and their domestic supplies remain scarce, keeping prices in local markets at record levels.

Virtually none of the increased production of the past two years has taken place in the Third World, partly because its farmers have been unable to afford expensive fertilisers and seeds while the profits of giant agrochemical and biotech companies have soared. Now as rich countries' economies slump, they are importing fewer commodities and goods from developing ones, driving national incomes down and increasing unemployment and poverty. As employment falls in the West, Third World immigrants are losing their jobs and are no longer able to send back the money they save from their wages in remittances to their families, a financial boost that is often crucial in keeping them out of dire poverty.

Just as serious, the FAO adds, the credit that Third World farmers need to buy seeds, energy and agricultural chemicals - and to improve production - is drying up.

Aid, too, is falling precipitously. Earlier this month, the World Food Programme - the UN agency that provides food to the hungry - announced that it was running out of supplies. Unless it receives more soon it expects to have to start rationing aid next month, and to run out of food altogether for needy countries such as Haiti, Sudan and Bangladesh by March.

At a special summit in June last year, rich governments pledged $12.3bn (£8.4bn) to tackle the food crisis, but have so far handed over only $1bn of it, as they have scrambled to provide trillions to bail out failing banks.

"Overcoming the financial crisis is critical," concludes the FAO in a recent report, "but continuing the fight against hunger by realising those pledged billions is no less important." Jacques Diouf, the FAO's director general, warns: "Unless the political will and donor pledges are turned into urgent and real actions, millions more will fall into deep poverty."

Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the World Food Programme, added: "While we worry about Wall Street and the high street, we are also paying attention to the needs of those who live in places with no street." She has called on governments to devote just 1 per cent of their bailout and stimulus packages to fighting hunger.

The worst is yet to come, taking the number of hungry beyond the one billion mark. As food prices fall, the FAO is reporting signs that farmers in Europe and North America are reducing their plantings for next year's harvest - and the same thing is likely to happen in the Third World as the lack of credit stops its farmers from being able to buy the food and agricultural chemicals they need. So next year's harvest, it is feared, will be smaller, even if the weather remains good.

The run of good seasons is unlikely to continue for long, even in the short run. And in the medium to long term, climate change is expected to make harvests dramatically worse. Mr Diouf predicts that, if the world fails to take urgent action to keep global warming beneath 2C, the emerging international target, "the global food production potential can be expected to contract severely" - with harvests dropping by up to 40 per cent in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Tears of the children

Tears of the Children
by David Grayling

Friends, I was struck by the haunting beauty of this crying girl. Her name is Imam Boudella. Her father was just released from Guantanamo Bay and flown back to Bosnia.

She waited excitedly at Sarajevo Airport to greet him after years of absence. He was escorted off the plane by Bosnian Security officials and driven away in an armoured van to be interrogated. She never saw him.

Sadly, all around the world, children like Imam are crying. They may be starving. They may be in the middle of a war zone or a siege. They may be dying of aids or some other easily preventable disease. They may be victims of incest or radiation from depleted uranium. They may have lost limbs from landmines, or parents. They may be being sexually abused by pedophiles or priests. They may have drunken fathers or mothers. They may be working twelve hours a day in dirty sweat shops, being beaten. Who would know? Who would care?

This X'mas, spare a moment for them and say a little prayer. The children of our world need us.

Brazilian Eco-Warriors at risk of assasination...

What is this world coming to? Twenty years after the killing of Chico Mendes, one of the world's most prominent rainforest defenders, hundreds of human rights and environmental activists still face the threat of assassination in Brazil new study claims.

The report, compiled by Brazil's Catholic Land Commission (CPT) and due to be released in full early next year, reveals that at least 260 people, among them a Catholic bishop, live under the threat of murder because of their fight against a coalition of loggers, farmers and cattle ranchers.

The list names Frei Henri des Rosiers, a French priest based in the Amazon town of Xinguara, as a particular target. Police are investigating claims he has a £14,000 price on his head because of his fight against slave labour. Also named are Maria José Dias da Costa, a union leader in the remote town of Rondon do Pará, and an Austrian bishop, Dom Erwin Krautler, who has been under 24-hour police guard for two years because of his battle against developers and child prostitution in his Amazonian diocese.

In February this year, Francisco da Silva, a 51-year-old leader of the landless movement in the Amazon, was killed with a single shot to the head. He had been named in a previous CPT report about rural leaders receiving death threats.

On Monday night the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to address the country on television to pay homage to the life of Mendes, a rubber tapper turned environmentalist who was gunned down outside his home on 22 December 1988. Lula's address is part of a wave of tributes across Brazil, from marches on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to celebrations in his hometown of Xapuri. But while his standing as a symbol of protest is not in doubt 20 years on, environmentalists and human rights activists are divided on Mendes's practical legacy.

Chico Mendes: Martyr for our times

It was when Chico's union successfully defended a piece of virgin rainforest sprinkled with rubber trees against the ranchers' attempts to claim it that the struggle became personal. Before the shooting of Mendes only 10 people had ever been brought to court for around 1,000 murders in the Amazon in the 1980s.

In his speeches he used to say: "Come here and kill me. My chest is open." He knew he might achieve more by his death than he had by his life.

Today the extractive reserves Chico championed are relatively successful in protecting parts of the Amazon, as are reserves run by the rainforest's indigenous people.

Now people talk of using carbon credits to protect similar areas around the world. And I realise that I had met the martyr for our times - the Gandhi, or perhaps the Che Guevara, of our environmental age.

Unpalatable Truths

Here's a collection of quotes that I posted to Quoteland.com somewhere around 2001, that make me go hmmmm... everytime I read them. As quotes are opinions, I thought they could go well on this blog as an alternative post.

***

The great masses of the people at the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously evil ... they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big."
-- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

"If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe."
-- A sign inside a church in Northern Ireland, explaining the origin of intolerance and hate.

The Israeli military men and capitalists, together with their Palestinian peers, do everything they can to remain in power. Their mass media and educational system spread vicious nationalistic propaganda, hatred and fear. Thus they divide and rule us. They incite against each other Arabs and Jews, East and West, while they continue to reign. These are our real enemies, preventing us from attaining physical and economical security. Against them Arabs and Jews should stand together.
-- Yair Khilou.

Yair Khilou, is a young activist in several radical left-wing groups, and one of the organisers behind the "letter of the twelfth-graders" (a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Sharon, signed by 62 youths, announcing their refusal to cooperate with the Israeli army's actions). Yair announced his conscientious objection to military service at the age of 16 and has refused to go through preliminary military medical and psychometric examinations.

Anybody interested in reading the whole article, is invited to click here: (makes an interesting reading) http://www.counterpunch.org/khilou.html
And the letter signed by 62(all between the ages 15-18) youths can be read here: http://www.newprofile.org/english/letters

"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Source: Thomas Jefferson to Jean Nicholas Demeunier, January 24, 1786

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to have without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Isn't man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife by the millions in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billions (9 billion in the U.S. alone in 1996) and eats them. This in turn kills man by the millions, because eating all these animals leads to degenerative -- and fatal -- health conditions like heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and
malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth."
-- C. David Coats

The inner fragmentation of man mirrors his view of the world 'outside' which is seen as a multitude of separate objects and events. The natural environment is treated as if it consisted of separate parts to be exploited by different interest groups. The fragmented view is further extended to society which is split into different nations, races, religious and political groups. The belief that all these fragments - in ourselves, in our environment and in our society - are really separate can be seen as the essential reason for the present series of social, ecological and cultural crisis. It has alienated us from Nature and from our fellow human beings. It has brought a grossly unjust distribution of natural resources creating economic and political disorder; an ever rising wave of violence, both spontaneous and institutionalized, and an ugly, polluted environment in which life has often become physically and mentally unhealthy.
-- Fritjof Capra, from The Tao of Physics

Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead of killing ten or twenty people with one club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that real change?
-- Eckhart Tolle, from The Power of Now

Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens."
-- Charles Derber,from Corporation Nation, p28

"A considerable proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor. Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty."
-- Philip Agee, from CIA Diary, p595

Gross utility kills beauty. We now have all over the world huge production of things, huge organizations, huge administrations of empire - all obstructing the path of life. Civilization is waiting for a great consummation, for an expression of its soul in beauty. This must be your contribution to the world.
-- Rabindranath (Thakur) Tagore.

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half so bad
if it isn't you.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
-- Barry Lopez, from Arctic Dreams

You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided.
-- Franz Kafka

Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured...
... People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.
-- Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from his address given at a conference on Ending the Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts, titled Apartheid in the Holy Land

Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation. Are we ready to get off our starting blocks? Are we ready, many millions of us, to rally not just on the streets, but at work and in schools and in our homes, in every decision we take, and every choice we make?
Or not just yet...
If not, then years from now, when the rest of the world has shunned us (as it should), like the ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany, we too will learn to recognize revulsion in the gaze of our fellow human beings. We too will find ourselves unable to look our own children in the eye, for the shame of what we did and did not do. For the shame of what we allowed to happen.
This is us. In India. Heaven help us make it through the night.
-- Arundhati Roy.

All over the world 24,000 people, mostly children, die from poverty every day. This is the true terrorism, and it is aided and abetted by politicians from rich, privileged and powerful countries who, in the cause of profit and feigning respectability, are salesmen of death. Their victims, and the rest of us, deserve better.
-- John Pilger, from his article titled, "How Britain's Armaments Fuel War And Poverty

When faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the "necrophiliac" world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she's twenty-six and she still doesn't own a car. But those who have put wealth and power above life are living in the world of death, in which the living put their tombstones - their framed certificates signifying acceptance to that world - upon their walls. Remember that even the editor of the Times, for all his income and prestige, is still a functionary, who must still take orders from his boss. He has less freedom than we do, and being the editor of the Times is as good as it gets.

You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?
-- George Monbiot, from his article titled Choose Life on http://www.zmag.org/Znet.htm

***

Expect additions in future to this topic. Most probably it would be done in the form of separate posts.

The loneliness of Manmohan Singh

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is under pressure from Indians to attack Pakistan. He is under pressure from his colleagues in the Congress Party, his opponents in the BJP and from the media to act. Condoleezza Rice has understood his dilemma and come to hold his hand. War with Pakistan is out of the question; the pressure is for mounting strikes against jihadi organisations.

What can he do? He could order strikes at the Markaz Dawa complex in Muridke near Lahore, where the Salafi Lashkar was based before moving to Muzaffarabad. He could order strikes at the Binori Masjid complex in Karachi, where the Deobandi Jaish-e-Muhammad was formed under Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai before his death. He must consider three things: how will it affect terrorism? How will it affect Pakistan? How will it affect India?

India can again apply military pressure on Pakistan's leaders but what does it seek this time? Indians want war on Pakistan's jihadis but war is already upon them. It is being fought between one Pakistan and another Pakistan. Zardari, Musharraf, the MQM, Kayani, Asfandyar Wali versus the Taliban, Jaish, Lashkar, Baitullah Mehsud, Lal Masjid. There are neutrals in the war -- Nawaz Sharif, Imran Khan, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Hameed Gul, Fazlur Rehman -- and at the moment they are leaning away from Zardari.

Less than a year ago, on December 27, 2007, Asif Ali Zardari lost his wife Benazir Bhutto to terrorists. General Ashfaq Kayani has lost over 1,000 of his soldiers fighting his own citizens. India is not obliged to help Zardari in Pakistan's war. But it would be a mistake to help the other side by weakening him. India wants to punish Pakistan but Pakistanis are already paying a heavy price for their mistakes.

Pakistan's inflation is at 25 Per cent. It is running out of foreign exchange and is being propped up by the IMF. Its markets have been de-capitalised by Pakistanis sending money abroad. GDP per Pakistani is $623. GDP per Indian is $900.

In 1991, India's GDP per capita was $328, Pakistan's was $458. In 1991, India was 28 per cent behind Pakistan. In 17 years, India has gone 30 per cent ahead. How did this happen?

For 17 years, four Indian governments have followed what is called Manmohanomics. In this period, four Pakistani governments followed a policy of 'strategic depth' in Afghanistan till 2001 and jihad in Kashmir till 2002. In 2007, India's GDP grew at 9.1 per cent, the second highest in the world. In this period, it shrugged off dozens of terror attacks including the Bombay train blasts which killed 209 people in 2006.

In the last five years, India created 11 million new jobs every year, the highest in the world and more than the job growth in China, Brazil and Russia combined. Every year, India pulls one per cent, 10 million -- one crore -- of its population out of poverty. This has happened with a single focus on economy. War, through all sorts of terrorism, and foreign policy has not been our concern.

One man began dismantling India's Nehruvian economy 17 years ago. He did it not because his party had any mandate to do this from the population: India votes for identity, not policy or governance. He did it because he believed that was the right thing for India.

That man, Dr Manmohan Singh, will go down in our history as the single most influential politician in India. More than Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Atal Behari Vajpayee. More even than the great Nehru.

Hundreds of millions of Indians have a better life in 2008 than they did in 1991 because of Manmohan Singh. Indians laugh at Manmohan Singh because he's dependent on Sonia Gandhi. L K Advani called him India's weakest prime minister. The ability to craft and deliver world-class policy did not win him our gratitude: Manmohan Singh cannot even win his own election. He lost the Lok Sabha election from South Delhi in 1999 and had to be nominated to the Rajya Sabha from Assam.

But Narasimha Rao's wisdom made him the finance minister and Sonia Gandhi's wisdom made him prime minister. Born in Chakwal, Singh is an economist trained at Cambridge and Oxford. His doctorate was on self-sustained growth in India, but he has decided that India can only grow if it embraces the world.

In the era of Manmohanomics, India's moralistic foreign policy has been abandoned in favour of pragmatism. Its anti-Americanism has disappeared. He holds the most enlightened views, which are brought out only when he's interviewed by foreign journalists: (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/int_manmohansingh.html).

He was asked why in 1991 he had agreed to take a job -- of liberalising India's economy -- that his peers were convinced would make him a scapegoat. He said: "If I fail, that's of no great consequence. And who fails if India wins?"

Nehru and Ambedkar fought against bigotry. India's pluralist constitution is a tower of white light amid a subcontinent of religious and ethnic nationalisms. Manmohan Singh is fighting against poverty and illiteracy. Indians must let him win this war he has been so good at fighting for them. India cannot be distracted by its legitimate anger into action that will have consequences it cannot control.

Manmohan Singh must be very lonely as he looks out at his people, who are urging him to get even with Pakistan. And in the process damage the work for which he should be cherished and honoured in our country and in the world.

India's Human Development Index, the status of its population's life expectancy, literacy, health and economy is .619. In another generation, in the lifetime of many of us, India can achieve an index value of .9 at which stage it will be a developed country.

Now that's a war worth fighting and winning.