statueman's Blog

Some of the articles I’m reading about the World Food Crisis are pointing at Capitalism as a reason why so many are going to bed hungry tonight.  From an April 11th article in TIME magazine “How Hunger Could Topple Regimes” by Tony Karon

“The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually impoverished majority of citizens may acquiesce to the rule of detested corrupt and repressive regimes when they are preoccupied with the daily struggle to feed their children and themselves, but when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose. That's especially true when the source of their hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy the available food supplies. And that's precisely what we're seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, ‘We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it.’”

  What’s surprising about this for me is that the world food crisis isn’t about shortages… it’s about prices.  Yup… I didn’t know that.  So today as I’m watching the news the points made in this article are being repeated on Fox and CNN.  It’s horrible to me to think that folks all over the world have to make a decision that includes breaking the law or starving.

  I keep watching the news and getting tidbits of this here and there because the rise in gas prices, the home owners’ problems, the democratic primary and the war in Iraq seem to be of much more importance to us right now.  Perhaps that’s because the World Food Crisis isn’t a result of natural disaster but the disaster of governments and business or more accurately, human greed.

   On April 14th President Bush ordered the release of $200 million dollars in emergency aid just to help aid agencies already in place to pay for the food they distribute.   I should mention that this $200 million is in addition to the $2 billion in world food aid that the US already supplies.

   But now we have countries like Egypt having food riots… is this possibly a ruse on the part some governments to get more aid from the US?  Are some governments more concerned with other issues than feeding the majority of their poor populations?  How much attention should we be paying to the World Food Crisis?