Famine–A New Approach is Needed
I recently responded to an online request for donations of money or blankets or food for the Horn of Africa by suggesting that they would be better off sending DIY vasectomy kits and condoms.
You would have thought that I had suggested taking the population out and shooting them. Callous was the least of the insults flung at me. In particular, the tirades of irrational and illogical abuse emitted by deity-botherers defied any rational analysis. Abortionist seemed to be their insult of choice. How vasectomies and using condoms leads to an increase in abortions beats me. But there you go. Religion and it’s fanatics has never been logical.
My argument is that for the last fifty years, every five years or so I have seen images of famine from the Horn of Africa. We see fly-blown skeletal babies with big eyes lying inert in their mother’s arms, too weak to tug at empty breasts. We see lines of people stretching to the horizon in queues for emergency relief. TV presenters fight with each other to cover the scene of greatest horror.
It is plain as a pikestaff that the way we have been providing famine relief is not working.
Part of the solution is social - we need a new attitude to famine and childbirth. Just because you have reproductive apparatus does not give you an unfettered right to use it. Children are seemingly not brought into the world in the Horn of Arica as the product of a caring relationship, but as a pension plan. Have 10, because 8 will die young and the other 2 will keep me when I am old. No food, don't worry, the aid agencies will provide. We need to do something different to create a sustainable social environment that does not rely on large families.
Part also must be the move to self-reliance from a begging bowl mentality. We keep providing aid, and as usual what starts as a favour becomes an obligation. Provide a meal today, and another will be expected tomorrow. This is where I do sound callous, the citizens of the Horn of Africa must put down the begging bowls, get off their bums and actually start to do it for themselves. They won’t do it for themselves until we stop providing aid.
Perhaps one ought to consider the role of the Aid Agencies in a dependency culture. Many a cushy job relies on a continuing inflow of charitable donations.
In regard to the physical environment, put 1 000 000 people on land that will support 100 000 and they will die. Finis und klaar. Farming practices must change. You will end up with a dustbowl that will not grow anything at all, even with unlimited water if goats and cattle devour everything in sight, especially the grass anchoring the soil.
Big Food and Big Pharm see famine as a profit centre, and as a way of disposing of surplus stock that no-one will buy anywhere else - look at the reports of baby feed dumped in third world countries because it cannot be sold lawfully in Europe or America.
I may well be callous, but the environment is a self-balancing organism - it will find a way of balancing out the numbers of consumers with the availability of resources. War, plague, famine, take your pick.
Iain Robertson