Instabilty in Food: Causes and Concerns

Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says the following: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

In my opinion, the prominent challenge that lies before leaders as we move into the future will be ensuring the access to this right in particular. Though people often assume that resources are the only factors needed to safeguard this right—and they truly are the essential component—the policies supported by leaders might also dramatically affect people’s ability to gain this security. If nothing more, the quality of supported policies clearly determine the amount of resources needed to sustain this right.

One aspect of this very broad right is food security. If people are unable to eat, then their “right to a standard of living adequate for health and wellbeing” is impeded upon. Though leaders can clearly not prevent a famine caused by drought, they can assuage the effects of the inevitable. This is of course done through the agricultural policies that leaders support and proselytize to developing world governments (countries where food shortages lead to starvation). Policies are not innocuous creatures, their impact can be so massive in scope that hundreds of thousands of lives can be saved or ruined as a result of them. For instance, the recommended policies for food production have changed dramatically since the 1980’s, when the IDF and the World Bank recommended to the developing world to reduce regulation and allow the market to play a greater role in shaping agricultural policy.

This recommendation led to the governments in the developing world to sell off food reserves and eliminate their investments and subsidies in agriculture. The result has been primarily positive until recently. Agriculture has been more efficient in the last thirty years, but we are finding that this increase in efficiency might be at the great cost of security. With governments no longer subsidizing their own farmers or keeping food reserves, certain regions have taken on the global burden of production for specific products like rice. When global food prices spiked last spring, chaos and suffering resulted in the developing world due to massive shortages of the exports people relied upon so heavily. And now, further instability—this time in the form of the food prices decreasing—has caused additional problems and fears in West Africa.

Of course, the reason for the increased food prices was unforeseeable at the time—the demand for bio-fuels massively increased demand for corn and other staple products—but should the existence of a crisis ever be unforeseeable? Though we will hopefully learn from our past blunders, there will always come to exist a future one. Whether it be man-made or nature made, we will again run into problems with a system so dependent on the good of so few. And when these problems again resurface, we will wonder again if our efficient system was worth the suffering of so many.

For futher readings on this topic in the news, please refer to the following links:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/11/24/081124ta_talk_surowiecki
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2008/12/22/081222mama_mail1
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/world/africa/26senegal.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=west%20africa&st=cse

New Speaker Series: Holocaust, Genocide, and Race Relations in World History

On February, 12th at 4 pm, the University of Southern California will welcome Dirk Moses to speak on the topic of "Rethinking the Relationship between Imperialism and the Holocaust." Since the 1930’s, the relationship between Nazism, the Holocaust and Imperialism has been controversial. His lecture will address the question of whether “genocide studies” and the “new imperial history” offer tools to rethink the relationship between anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.

The talk is sponsored through the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies at the Department of History at USC, and will be located at USC’s main campus in the Intellectual Commons of the Doheny Library. Dirk Moses is an exceptional scholar, and the author of, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge, 2007). He additionally is the editor of Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (Berghahn, 2008), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (Berghahn, 2004). Finally, he is the coeditor of Colonialism and Genocide (Routledge, 2007), and The Oxford Handbook on Genocide Studies (forthcoming).

Civilians: the Major Causality of War in Gaza

Conflict in the Middle East appears constant in recent years, but the problems that are currently dissipating have incurred serious causalities.  As most are aware, after the six-month cease-fire between Gaza and Israel ended in December, conflict between the two groups was immediately reignited.  Instigated primarily by the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel, the conflict was intensely escalated by the air and ground campaign issued by Israel in response to Gaza’s aggression on December 27^th. The causalities are extensive, and unfortunately, many civilians were lost in the process of the war.

My aim is not to criticize Israel’s decision to attack Gaza; instead, I am concerned with a conflict that left over 1,300 Palestinians dead in less than a month, of which 600-900 are rumored to be civilians.  Clearly, Israel intended to make an aggressive statement in attempts to protect their people, but were the methods used to accomplish that task justified?  Many human rights organizations think not, and have launched numerous investigations regarding the targets and weapons of attack used by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).  At the top of the list is Israel’s use of white phosphorous, of which certain uses were banned in the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in 1980.  Though white phosphorus was clearly used, there remains debate in how frequently it was misused, and investigations are currently being undergone on this topic.  Additional critiques of Israel have been the frequency of which humanitarian aid resources were harmed in the conflict; UN buildings and Red Cross/Crescent supplies were damaged or ruined in the course of the month long discord.   Adnan Abu Hasna, a spokesman for UN Relief and Works Agency said that during the conflict “tens of millions of dollars of aid have been destroyed.”  Finally, one must question the motives of a war that ended with a huge percentage of its causalities being civilians.  It took Israel four days to allow humanitarian organizations access into the area, which in this situation was horribly detrimental.   Not only was the Shifa hospital completely overwhelmed and desperately lacking supplies, but the shortage of power and running water was rampant in Gaza.  Both of these things led to increased death and hardship for Palestinian civilians that could have been alleviated or dissipated with increased humanitarian aid.

I am very empathetic with Israel’s need to establish peace for their people, and I think everyone can understand how such an intense priority can bleed the line of right and wrong, but I fear that their actions in the last month have only escalated tensions and angers on behalf of the Palestinians.  If this is true, then I fear that many civilian lives were unjustifiably lost for a very short time of peace.