Hunger and Violence

The head of the Haitian "government" has lost his job.

• ...when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose. That's especially true when the source of their hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy the available food supplies. And that's precisely what we're seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, "We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

• When all that stands between hungry people and a warehouse full of rice and beans is a couple of padlocks and a riot policeman (who may be the neighbor of those who're trying to get past him, and whose own family may be hungry too), the invisible barricade of private-property laws can be easily ignored. Doing whatever it takes to feed oneself and a hungry child, after all, is a primal human instinct. So, with prices of basic foods skyrocketing to the point that even the global aid agencies — whose function is to provide emergency food supplies to those in need — are unable, for financial reasons, to sustain their current commitments to the growing army of the hungry, brittle regimes around the world have plenty of reason for anxiety.

Without a strong public justice system that can relegate the influence of corruption, the "triumph of capitalism" needs many caveats. We in the US take for granted how strong our justice system is compared to other societies/nations and forget to factor in the huge influence of corruption/political patronage/bribery/warlordism in other parts of the world relative its influence in ours. We have all these problems in the US, just to a much lesser degree than most emerging Democracies. We need to learn, if we intend to continue to be exporters of democracy, that elections are only the first baby steps of building successful democracies. And if you have to keep your military there to prop up the democratically elected government, you probably are not dealing with a country that is ready for/willing to work for Democray.
- posted by john @ 3:23 PM