paradigm-shift

www.famine-relief.com is now up, as a focus for this work. Since starting this project in earnest, I have read quite a lot on the web about famine-relief and subscribe to several useful mailing-lists on the subject. There is truly heroic work going on, notably by the WFP. Other key sources are the UK's Bond organisation and World Humanitarian Forum.

These fine organisations and their counterparts are understandably concerned with such matters as:

• the horror of famine
• the logistics of getting food to the starving
• the desperate need to raise funds for food and transportation.

If you read those NGOs' material for too long, it's easy (I've found) to become overwhelmed by the scale and the horrendous detail of this long-running global epidemic (whose death-toll makes covid seem short-lived and mild).

My focus is going to be the need for a paradigm-shift that somehow majorly transforms this situation such that it is unrecognisably better in just a short time. Such a change could come from science and/or technology, or maybe from economics and/or politics. It could be comparable with the attitudinal shift that has taken place in recent decades to environmental matters, where people and governments have started to take climate-change seriously.

This is what we seek: a paradigm shift on famine.

c'est bon mais ce n'est pas le famine-relief

We're being distracted from famine by other issues.

Covid hasn't derailed the global cavalcade of aid-related conferences and reports. The meetings may have shifted online, but the PowerPoints are also up there, along with the glossy PDF brochures. Like major sporting-events, reviews dated 2020 have only appeared this year and the message of human deprivation is all the gloomier for the pandemic's direct effect on the health of the poor, as well as its indirect impact on the public finances. Britain's brutal aid-cut, bravely resisted in parliament by inter alia a former prime minister, is tragically supported by more than 70% of the UK's population.

The World Humanitarian Forum has produced 211 pages on its global review and the UK's Bond group offers 28 pages on what the UK can do. Meanwhile, the British House of Commons' International Development Committee continues to deliberate. Although famine is a massive and urgent problem, discussion of it seems to me to have become mired in the consideration of all sorts of other important but separate issues, including:

• climate
• culture
• decolonisation
• rights
• trade
• corruption
• education
• gender
• conflict
• democracy
• exploitation
• migration.

While it is true that some or all of these matters are important, and some or all of them may contribute to world poverty, national and international discussion seems to be more concerned with ticking the right boxes for current concerns among western politicians and media than with getting food and water to dying people as soon as possible. If a house is on fire you don't stop to assess the diversity of the trapped occupants or of the firefighters; you send in whomever you have to rescue whomever they can.

I think aid needs to get back to basics - helping those in urgent need. You can help now but there's also a role for lobbying governments to concentrate on meeting the basic requirements of the world's 0.7bn destitute people.