Saturday, July 23, 2005
(12:20 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
More News from Niger
Via The H Was O, I learn that Niger -- currently in the news for not selling uranium to Iraq -- is suffering a major humanitarian crisis. People are starving, yet the government insists on charging people for food:More than 3.5m people need food aid after poor rains and a locust invasion, and some accuse the government of ignoring the crisis.The New York Times Africa page contains, among other things, news of a terrorist blast that killed 59 in Egypt, the tale of some rough treatment of Secretary Rice's entourage in Sudan, and some Iraq- and London-bombing-related news. Thankfully, the world media at large, as represented by a Google News Search, is not so ridiculously skewed.
But a government spokesman Mohamed Ben Omar said that its food stocks could not be handed out for free.
The UN says it has not had a single pledge for money for its Niger appeal.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has called for $16.2m to buy food for those suffering from recurring drought and a locust infestation.
Some 150,000 young children are said to be severely malnourished already.
Now, for some hard-hitting fact-based opinions, that commodity that blog-readers demand and crave: Terrorism is not the biggest fucking problem in the world! It just isn't. This current problem in Niger is bigger than 1000 9/11's in terms of probable loss of life -- and this is just in one country. The world's resolve is firm in the wake of the death of 30 people in London -- but until a couple days ago, the world couldn't give a flying fuck about 150,000 malnourished children. Is it because there's nothing to be done about hunger? I mean, there will always be hungry people, right? Well, we've invaded two countries and clamped down on civil liberties and tortured and deported and indefinitely detained, all ostensibly in the quest to get rid of terrorism, and guess what: there's still terrorism a-plenty. Imagine if we devoted those same resources to getting rid of world hunger -- I bet we would get better results, and maybe the terrorism problem would lessen as an indirect result as well.
I know, I know: all the really morally serious people know that terrorism is an existential threat to our very way of life and that this kind of nihilism cannot be allowed to stand. The kind of nihilism that allows people to starve to death in some countries while in other countries tomatoes are thrown out by the ton for not being shiny and plump enough -- well, that's actually the foundation of our precious "way of life." In order for things to keep trucking along like they are, Walmart has to pay shitty wages, housing prices have to continue to rise, and people have to starve to death, preferably in Africa, because no one really pays attention to what goes on there.
