The present flurry of activity around steeply rising world food prices exemplifies in many ways a critical failing in the way we collectively perceive modern crises.
Discussions in London yesterday and previously within aid agencies and even the FAO have treated the present crisis like an old style disaster, that is an abortion, a deviation from the norm, something which can be compensated for so we can all move on. Compensation means emergency aid to feed those who now find food just too expensive. This is needed, but…..
Such an analysis is utterly failing to connect the dots. It is an analysis of symptoms not causes. Alex De Waal, one of the sharpest analysts of famine and crisis in Africa talks of disasters not as abnormalities but of accelerations of underlying normal trends. If processes are in motion in society which expand the gap between rich and poor, disasters will drive these processes harder. If people’s rights are systematically violated in “normal” times, they will be more violated in times of crisis. Disasters and crises are accelerations of exploitative an exclusionary trends.
If we look afresh at the present food crisis, we should be focusing on three things all of which are to do with what we accept as the norm...
Read more on the Tufts blog.
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