The global financial crisis should not take precedence over the prerequisite of feeding the poor and hungry. But the world financial meltdown has pushed the ranks of the world’s hungry to a record one billion. By the United Nations’ recent estimate, hunger now affects one in six people. Compared with last year, there are 100 million more people who are hungry. The link between hunger and instability is clear. Soaring prices of staples have triggered riots in the developing world, some deadly. Hunger engenders frustration, anger and inevitably leads to social and political unrest. Hunger and hopelessness go hand in hand. Hopelessness breeds contempt for the very financial and economic system that creates gross inequalities of income.
It used to be thought that the poor have nothing, or little, to lose if stock markets crash. Not so. The financial crisis impacts the poor as well as rich. It is the wealthier nations that worry more about the financial crisis because they have more to lose. The lesson of history is that the rich believe they have more at stake and will stop short of nothing to save the system which props up their privileged positions, including slashing development assistance to the impoverished peoples of the world. The prospects of a drastic reduction in Western aid, investment and debt relief looms large. With world markets in disarray, the likelihood of de-linkage between the financial system of the Western and the developing worlds increases.
Early in the year, decisive action by governments around the world was deployed to deal with the international financial crisis. Money in the billions of dollars was thrown at the problem. Yet, nothing was done to alleviate the food crisis engulfing the underdeveloped and developing countries. Hunger always serves to strengthen the rich and weaken the poor. Hunger sums up the essence of a world order based on profits and state power. Political and business leaders in both industrialized and developing nations avoid doing anything that might jeopardize profits and their networks of vested interests.
There is no shortage of food, yet scarcity is forced on those who have no money to buy it. The world has an unprecedented capacity to produce — to feed and clothe everyone — but it is dominated by a system that produces waste and hunger instead. It used to be that skeletal African children shown on television screens forced people with the means to act. But the West has long become inured to pictures of bloated empty stomachs, of naked children, their hollow eyes staring straight ahead, patiently waiting for the arrival of death to relieve them. And the better off stare right back in numbness born from a saturation of facts and figures that have apparently become meaningless to so many people. The dire figures make it highly unlikely that a goal set by the wealthiest nations to cut hunger in the world in half by 2015 will be met. World leaders at the Group of Eight summit gathering in Italy next month will tackle the issue but as the hunger rate rises — the number of hungry people is growing quicker than the world population — a grim milestone that poses a threat to peace and security has just been reached.
Let Iraq be the test of openness
The Guardian yesterday commented on the British government’s decision to hold an inquiry into the Iraq war, saying in part:
It is the obvious conclusion from events of recent weeks: Transparency matters. And yet that wisdom continues to elude the British prime minister, as he demonstrated last week when announcing the terms of a new inquiry into the Iraq war. Its aim to identify “lessons to be learned” is laudable. Its authority to call witnesses and examine documents is impressive. But the plan to conduct most of it in secret is profoundly wrong.
There is a superficially appealing justification. Civil servants, ministers and intelligence officers may be more candid in private. A little discretion, goes this argument, is a fair price for a more truthful account of things. But that view contains the peculiar assumption that senior officials only lie in public. That sort of informal covenant, highly esteemed in Westminster, means nothing to the rest of the country. It is of a piece with the honesty box approach that governed MPs’ expenses, now exposed as a scam. One lesson from the expenses scandal is that partial disclosure arouses as much suspicion of a cover-up as it dispels. There can be no half-measures. If individuals in the Iraq inquiry want to dodge questions and dissemble, let them try to do so in full public view. Iraq has hardly been swept under the carpet. Two parliamentary committees and two independent inquiries have investigated aspects of the war. Their combined reports afford a fairly rich narrative of events. Is there anything still to come out?
The answer is “yes”. Tony Blair, it transpires, has made clear to Brown his wish for the new inquiry to be held in private. The very fact of that intervention — a covert bid by the central player to fix the game — demonstrates the need for more open hearings. So does the revelation of plans, hatched by the Bush administration, to provoke Baghdad into an act of military aggression.
