-Caveat Lector-
We have warehouses of butter
We have oceans of wine
We have famine when we need it
We have designer crime
We've got porsche
Mercedes
Ferarri
Rolls Royce.
Yeah....
We've got choice....
Roger Waters Amused to Death 1992
What God Wants, God Gets....God help us all.
Nurev Ind Research wrote:
>
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> FROM: Le Monde diplomatique
>
> The politics of hunger
> by IGNACIO RAMONET
>
> Now here�s a statistic you might have missed. The total wealth
> of the world�s three richest
> individuals is greater than the combined gross domestic product
> (1) of the 48 poorest countries
> - a quarter of all the world�s states. Everybody knows inequality
> has increased over the last 20
> years of unfettered ultra-liberalism. But who could have imagined
> the gap had widened so far?
> In 1960 the income of the 20 % of the world�s population living in
> the richest countries was 30
> times greater than that of the 20 % in the poorest countries.
>
> Now we learn that in 1995 it was 82 times greater
> (2). In over 70 countries, per capita income is
> lower today than it was 20 years ago. Almost three billion people
> - half the world's population -
> live on less than two dollars a day. While goods are more abundant
> than ever before, the
> number of people without shelter, work or enough to eat is
> constantly growing. Of the 4_ billion
> people giving in developing countries, almost a third have
> no drinking water. A fifth of all
> children receive an insufficient intake of calories or protein.
> And two billion people - a third of
> the human race - are suffering from anemia.
>
> Is this the way it has to be? The answer is no. The UN calculates
> that the whole of the world
> population's basic needs for food, drinking water, education
> and medical care could be covered
> by a levy of less than 4 % on the accumulated wealth of the
> 225 largest fortunes. To satisfy all
> the world's sanitation and food requirements would cost only
> $13 billion, hardly as much as the
> people of the United States and the European Union spend each
> year on perfume.
>
> Next month will see the 50th anniversary of the Universal
> Declaration on Human Rights, which
> states that "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". But for most of humanity,
> these rights are increasingly inaccessible.
>
> Consider, for example, the right to food. Food is not in
> short supply. In fact, food products have
> never been so abundant. There is enough available to provide
> each of the Earth's inhabitants
> with at least 2,700 calories a day. But production alone is
> not enough. The people who need
> the food must be able to buy it and consume it. And that is
> precisely the problem. Thirty million
> people a year die of hunger. And 800 million suffer from
> chronic malnutrition.
>
> Again, there is nothing inevitable about this. Climatic problems
> are often predictable. When
> humanitarian organizations like Action Against Hunger (3) are
> able to intervene, they can often
> nip a famine in the bud in a matter of weeks.
>
> And yet hunger continues to decimate whole populations.
>
> Why? Because hunger has become a political weapon. In
> today's world, no famine is gratuitous.
> Hunger is a strategy pursued with unbelievable cynicism
> by governments and military regimes
> whom the end of the cold war has deprived of a steady income.
> Rather than starving the
> enemy, as Sylvie Brunel points out (4), they are starving their
> own populations in order to cash
> in on media coverage and international compassion, an
> inexhaustible source of money, food
> and political platforms.
>
> In Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, North Korea, Burma and Afghanistan,
> governments and military
> leaders are holding innocent people hostage and starving
> them for political ends, sometimes
> with appalling cruelty. In Sierra Leone, the men of
> ex-Corporal Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary
> United Front (RUF), in a horrific year-long campaign of
> terror, have been systematically
> chopping off peasants' hands with machetes to prevent
> them cultivating the land. Climate has
> become a marginal factor in major famines. It is man who
> is starving man. Amartya Sen, the
> winner of this year's Nobel prize for economics, is renowned
> for showing how government
> policies can cause famine even when food is abundant. On
> several occasions, he has stressed
> "the remarkable fact that, in the terrible history of
> famines in the world, no substantial famine
> has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country
> with a relatively free press (5)".
> Rejecting the arguments of the neo-liberals, Professor
> Sen contends that greater responsibility
> for the well-being of society must be given, not to the
> market, but to the state. A state that must
> be sensitive to the needs of its citizens and, at the same
> time, concerned with human
> development throughout the world.
>
> Translated by Barry Smerin
>
> (1) Overall national production of goods and services.
> (2) Human Development Report 1998, United Nations Development Programme,
> New
> York, September 1998. See also Dominique Vidal, "Dans le Sud, d�veloppement
> ou
> r�gression?", Le Monde diplomatique, October 1998.
> (3) UK office: 1, Catton Street, London WC1R 4AB, email [EMAIL PROTECTED];
> US
> office: 875 avenue of the Americas, Suite 1905, New York NY 10001, email
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> (4) See Sylvie Brunel and Jean-Luc Bodin, G�opolitique de la faim. Quand la
> faim est une arme, (annual report by Action Against Hunger), PUF, Paris,
> 1998, 310
> p., 125 F, soon to be available in English as "The Hunger Report".
> (5) See "Human Rights and Asian Values: What Lee Kuan Yew and Le Peng don't
> understand about Asia", The New Republic, July 14, 1997.
>
> ALL RIGHTS RESERVED � 1998 Le Monde diplomatique
>
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DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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