somebody else's problem

You can do something right now to stop your fellow-humans from dying. So why don't you? Why don't I? Around a tenth of humanity have food-related problems. Of these 0.7bn, 45m need help right now. The United Nations' World Food Programme is ready to help those people and online giving lets us send funds without delay from our phone, tablets and computers.

There is plenty of spare money in the world. We spend billions on luxuries such as confectionery, tourism, gambling, entertainment and alcoholic drinks. So why do we put our comfort and enjoyment before our starving brothers' and sisters' needs? Here are some excuses/reasons:

• aid-money doesn't reach the poor
• my hard-earned money belongs to me and no-one else has any right to it
• I need my luxuries to keep me happy and sane
• poverty is a political problem which must be solved by politicians
• famine is the fault of the nations' governments, and the people of those countries need to pressure their rulers to solve that problem
• destitution is inevitable; a fact of life
• let richer people set an example and maybe I'll follow
• I already give to overseas aid through my taxes. 

recent UK funding of World Food Programme

In recent years, the United Kingdom has been the third biggest contributor to the World Food Programme, after America and Germany. However, in July, the UK ranked seventh, having given less than Norway (pop. 5.5m).

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.

shortfall in UN's food-aid budget = 0.3% of what the world spends on alcoholic drink

As I write this and as you read this, someone is starving. Indeed, many people are starving. Arguably, almost 0.7bn people are starving.

Some of us live in countries where there is little or no starvation, so the problem isn't evident to us. Imagine, though, if someone who badly needed food was right in front of you and you had the means to help them. It would be difficult to resist the desire to do something. Imagine you were eating a large meal while being watched by people who have scarcely anything to eat. It would be impossible to continue eating. Yet distance is all that separates those of us who have more than enough to eat from starving people.

Such distances have come to matter less than they used to, beginning with sea-travel, radio and television, then airliners and now the internet. And, of course, these people always were our fellow human beings, regardless of the distance which separated us. The humanitarian urge significantly predates distance-shrinking technology. Many religions and cultures include almsgiving as a spiritual and social duty. The abolition of poverty isn't just an act of charity but can conduce to social order.

The World Food Programme reports that: "Conflict is driving hunger in nearly all the world’s main food crises. War leads to greater food insecurity. And, in its turn, food insecurity increases the chances of unrest and violence." Thus, conflict resolution is an indirect way of solving the problem of poverty. Just as the UN's poverty-reduction goal was met five years early, the world has also become a more peaceful place. So the trend is good (even though covid has set things back).

What will not go away, however, is the reality of the hundreds of millions who are starving right now. These are the people who are metaphorically sitting across from you at your well-stocked dinner-table. In 2020, the World Food Programme raised $8.4bn, but it needed another $5.3bn, less than a 10th of the $67bn that people spent gambling online. Plainly, to many in the developed world, feeding the starving isn't a priority.

People with enough to eat can successfully argue that their money is theirs to do with what they choose. Also, they are not the cause of poverty and, anyway, their taxes are used by governments to send aid overseas. Furthermore, it is widely believed that some of that aid does not even reach the poor. Forbes has reported a World Bank survey which found that significant amounts of aid money ended up in tax havens. Considerable amounts of UK aid money are tied to social, cultural and political objectives which may not be principally about relieving abject poverty but, rather, placating political lobbies in the donor nations. The Guardian has reported: "Too much of Britain’s aid budget is being spent poorly by Whitehall departments on projects that fail the test of reducing poverty in the world’s poorest countries, [The ONE Group] has said."

United Kingdom aid is scrutinised by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. In a 2019 review of five years' activity, the commission concluded: "UK aid has shown it can deliver in the midst of conflict, in some of the world’s most challenging contexts, giving the UK more flexibility to pursue its objectives and enhance its leadership role in the international response to crises. However, UK aid does not yet have a convincing approach to addressing the long-term drivers of conflict and fragility."

What is one to conclude? Like every human undertaking, famine relief isn't a perfect system; it is open to corruption and human error. One would have to be very cynical, though, to believe that all emergency aid went missing. It is probable that most of it does alleviate suffering. For the current year, the World Food Programme says it needs $12.3bn, yet it expects only to receive $7.4bn (60%). Although government-budgets are understandably stressed because of covid, this missing $5bn is trivial when compared to what mankind might spend this year on gambling (see above), confectionery ($210bn) or alcoholic drinks ($1,640bn). The WFP's projected shortfall is thus equivalent to 0.3% of the world's booze market.

Can we do something about that?

the biggest issue

For some months now I've been reading, blogging and tweeting about food-poverty and, believe me, it's a grim watch to be on. Although the UN's millennium goal on poverty was met five years early, there are still perhaps 0.8bn people who are desperately poor, probably more since covid struck.

It strikes me that, for as long as any of our fellow-humans is starving, pretty well all human activity (apart from famine-relief itself) should take a lower priority. So much of what we do, particularly in the realm of leisure, entertainment and luxury, seems to be in appallingly bad taste for as long as the money we spend could be put to indubitably better use. I don't mean this censoriously, including myself among the guilty rich!

While personal donations have a noble role to play, they are a drop in the ocean when compared with the immense giving-power of governments. It is particularly tragic that the British government is cutting aid from 0.7% to 0.5% of grossnational income, and, worse, 72% of voters agree with them (some wanting it cut to 0%). Although the World Food Programme gets some $8bn a year, it just scratches the surface.

I fear we're all in for a drubbing at judgement-day if we can't say that we've properly addressed the matter and moderated our enjoyments in order to do so. It's not enough to say that poverty is caused by politics and war and/or that some aid goes astray. There are sure-fire ways of ensuring that the hungry are fed and, if they were right in front of us, we'd probably do something.

If you want to do something yourself now, please give to the World Food Programme through my justgiving appeal. Politically, please do all you can to persuade G7 and other nations to sustain and increase their giving. In the UK, the aid budget goes through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office who are scrutinised by the relevant House of Commons committee. Lobbyists in this area are Bond. Start a dialogue on aid with your deputy, senator, TD or MP.

covid-denial

Some people I know, many of them intelligent, devout and kind, object to the measures that governments have taken to stop the spread of covid. What I have to ask them is whether they object to the measures because:

• such measures are intrinsically unjust, however bad the disease
• covid isn't a serious enough disease to warrant such measures?

If they hold the first position, they would presumably agree with the statement that deaths caused by a serious infection are acceptable because the right to go out and socialise is more important. If they hold the second position, they would presumably support measures such as those that have been taken with covid if they believed that a particular disease actually was dangerous.

I would want to ask those who supported unrestricted circulation in time of plague whether they really mean that! I'd want to ask those who say covid isn't dangerous to produce peer-reviewed scientific papers to prove it; theories about freemasons and reptiles just aren't enough.