GMW: Poverty and Hunger in New Orleans and Africa

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GMW: Poverty and Hunger in New Orleans and Africa

" GM WATCH " <info

Mon, 5 Sep 2005 11:15:37 +0100

 

 

 

GM WATCH daily

http://www.gmwatch.org

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This was written before the evacuation of New Orleans finally took

place but it remains relevant.

 

EXCERPT: " US-style development does not only destroy the livelihoods of

African farmers; since 1945 nearly 90% of US farmers have lost their

jobs. Now that we can all see the poor and hungry in New Orleans we can

see that the problem is not the absence of GM crops - it's the economy,

stupid! "

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IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID!

Poverty and Hunger in New Orleans and Africa.

by Robert Vint - 4th September 2005

 

The world has been shocked by the images from New Orleans. Clearly in

part this was because the scenes looked so like the interminable images

of Third World disasters. There on our TV screens were the same same

refugee camps, the same insanitary conditions, the same hungry and

destitute people begging for help.

 

For many viewing this disaster from other nations, however, the more

shocking realisation was that even before the hurricane much of the

population of a city in the world's richest and most powerful nation was

clearly living in Third World conditions. Here were people whose

existence

had hardly been registered in the policies of their own government or

in the media of their own nation, but who had finally been forced into

public view and the attention of the world by a catastrophe. If we were

to look, without rose-tinted spectacles, at the life of the underclass

of New York or Chicago or many other US cities we would find the same

destitution.

 

The poor of New Orleans, living on the Gulf coast and at the mouth of

the Mississippi, are not on the periphery of the nation, far from the

centres of wealth production. It did not take five days to get food and

fuel to them because they were inaccessible. Both in the hinterland and

just off the coast are the main sites of American oil extraction. The

harvests of the prairies are shipped down the Mississippi by boat. From

there the grain is exported as animal feed and, when there is an

unsellable surplus, as food aid. Any suggestion that food and fuel

produced a

hundred miles upstream could not within hours have been taken by boat

along the nation' main shipping route to a flooded city built on its

banks is absurd. It was not technological problems that prevented food

from the world's main stockpile of food aid from being shipped a hundred

miles, it was political and economic obstacles.

 

The threat of flooding in New Orleans had been known about for decades.

For decades the mayor and people of the city have been calling for

federal assistance to strengthen and enlarge the levees. Instead of

tackling the problem, the federal government since 2001 has halved annual

funding for levees protecting New Orleans and south-east Louisiana from

$69million to $36.5million - even though they knew the city could not

survive a major storm. Does President Bush still believe that this

economic

saving outweighs what he calls the " temporary disruption " that will now

cost New Orleans an estimated one hundred thousand million dollars?

 

The threat of flooding, storms, drought and desertification by global

warming from greenhouse gas emission has also been highlighted for

decades. There is global scientific consensus about the nature and

severity

of the problem. Britain's Chief Scientist, David King, has repeatedly

warned that global warming is a far greater threat than terrorism.

Global warming not only threatens the poor and the environment, it also

threatens the national economy and virtually every industry other than

the

oil industry. Instead of tackling this problem the federal government

has allowed itself to be taken over by heads of the oil companies;

scientists have been harassed, pseudo-scientists have been promoted,

emission laws have been abolished and the global Kyoto treaty has been

sabotaged. Military resources have been massively diverted from

protecting the

homeland to protecting Middle Eastern sources of oil for the US oil

industry. Half of Lousiana's own troops, recruited mainly from the poor

and black underclass, were in Iraq when disaster struck.

 

New Orleans may be the first western city to be lost to global warming.

Even President Bush has belatedly acknowledged that Hurricane Katrina

has been far more catastrophic than September 11. Even the most

blinkered monetarist economist can see that in purely economic terms

the cost

will be immense. But, as oil prices skyrocket in the aftermath of the

hurricane, will the oil industry and their puppets in Washington ignore

the needs of both people and planet and calculate that the profits from

a gas-guzzling economy still exceed the cost of the storm damage to

their oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico?

 

Over the last forty years America's public services and welfare system

have been dismantled. To facilitate tax cuts for the rich, public

transport provision has collapsed, public hospitals have had their

funding

slashed, social services have disappeared. The income gap between rich

and poor has widened dramatically. Hunger is increasing; about 33

million Americans go hungry - for now still less than the number

suffering

from obesity. Over 9 million US children receive food aid from

non-Governmental sources. America's Second Harvest - the largest domestic

hunger-relief organization in the United States - has launched a food

aid fund

for the victims of Hurricane Katrina**. Sri Lanka has sent aid; even

Venezuela is offering food to the victims. In contrast, the increasingly

poor underclass have ceased to be seen by their own Government as

worthy of assistance of any kind and are instead viewed as potential

criminals to be treated with 'zero tolerance'.

 

When this entirely predictable and avoidable disaster hit, and the call

was made for New Orleans to be evacuated, no public assistance was

provided to help people leave. At the epicentre of America's oil industry

quarter of the population of this city could not afford cars. The oil

barons left in their private jets, the middle classes left in their cars,

but there was not even a functional public transport system remaining

to enable the carless underclass to leave, or ambulances for the

crippled, or helpers to bring out the elderly. The superdome,

allocated for

those who could not afford to leave, was equipped with no communication

system or medical facilities and six toilets for 25,000 people. Plans to

equip the Superdome for disaster relief were abandoned last year due to

shortage of funds. Whilst the US media could spend millions on live

coverage from the disaster scene and instantaneous global transmission of

the news, the US Government appeared not to have the money or the will

to reach its own citizens. 'Natural disasters' always

disproportionately affect the poor - prompting the Red Cross and IIED

to issue a report,

entitled 'Natural Disasters: Acts of God or acts of man?'*, which

concludes that most deaths from 'natural disasters' and many of the

disasters themselves can be blamed on environmental mismanagement and the

consequences of poverty.

 

People rescuing food from flooded supermarkets to feed their children

and elderly relatives were labelled 'looters' because they were black

and poor; the Governor called for zero tolerance and instructed troops to

shoot to kill. Day after day, volunteers bringing food to the city were

turned back by troops. Refugees abandoned without food for five days

had guns pointed at them whenever they asked for help.

 

The US is keen to export its own model of economic development to other

nations. Third World nations are repeatedly told - by USAID, the IMF,

World Bank and WTO - to dismantle their welfare systems, their schools,

hospitals and public transport systems. If they do this, and if they

agree to tolerate policies that exacerbate the gap between the rich and

the poor, then, they are told, their economies will grow and wealth will

eventually trickle down to the poor. In response, many nations have

abandoned their land reform projects and thrown poor farmers off the land

to make way for corporate hi-tech agribusiness. They have replaced

targets for maximising food sovereignty with policies for maximising

exports. When the poor inevitably become hungry, the US, instead of

helping

local farmers by buying their food for aid, dump their own surplus grain

from stockpiles at the mouth of the Mississippi. The farmers, unable to

sell anything because of the free dumped food flooding the market, give

up growing. Their Governments are then told that agriculture is failing

because of technological inadequacies such as the absence of GM crops.

US-style development does not only destroy the livelihoods of African

farmers; since 1945 nearly 90% of US farmers have lost their jobs. Now

that we can all see the poor and hungry in New Orleans we can see that

the problem is not the absence of GM crops - it's the economy, stupid!

 

All the leading development charities in the UK agree that hunger is a

problem caused by inequality, lack of food sovereignty and the

maldistribution of food and that GM crops are therefore not relevant to

preventing hunger. They wrote jointly to Tony Blair to tell him not to

use

this fraudulent argument to promote GM crops. Food experts around the

world share this view as do the food and farming organisations

representing

small and family farmers in the Third World. America likes to believe

that it is the breadbasket of the world; in fact since the introduction

of GM crops it has become a net importer of food. As it is becoming

increasingly clear that it is unable to feed its own poor adequately

it is

time the rest of the world started rejecting its misguided strategy for

feeding the world and the dishonest economic ideology upon which it is

based.

 

Anyone seriously involved in promoting food sovereignty, resisting GM

crops and the corporate take-over of agriculture, fighting iniquitous

IMF and World Bank policies or trying to ensure that energy policies are

based upon sound climate science - all potentially life and death

matters for millions - will find, eventually, that they are fighting the

same enemy. Virtually all the interlinked US lobby organisations advising

their Government are pushing the same package of ideas for the same

corporations.

 

As refugees at the convention center in New Orleans died day after day,

survivors started referring to the unfolding events as genocide. The

avoidable disaster killed thousands, the catastrophic handling of the

situation killed thousands more. If the people of New Orleans are

wondering who is responsible for pushing the policies causing their

poverty and

hunger, for the absence of public services, for the rising sea level

and increasing number of severe storms, for the failure to reinforce

their levees and for the painfully slow response to their plight, then

they

need to look no further than corporate lobby groups such as the Hudson

Institute, the Center for Global Food Issues, the Competitive

Enterprise Institute, the National Center for Public Policy Research and

Consumer Alert***. Isn't it time these organisations were indited for

complicity in genocide?

 

Copyright Robert Vint (rjvint)

Available in Word or PDF format.

May be circulated for non-profit purposes.

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* Natural Disasters: Acts of God or acts of man? Earthscan paperbacks

(1984). ISBN 0905347544

**To donate to the Katrina food aid relief fund run by America's Second

Harvest visit http://64.26.27.24/default2.asp

***For more on these organisations see 'Why do the key GM Food

advocates oppose the Kyoto Treaty?' (2001) by Robert Vint.

 

 

 

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