The Dark Side of Sovereignty

Poor Burma.
If ever a country deserved better, it is Burma. A peaceful, predominantly Buddhist country, rich in natural resources and fertile land, Burma should be the economic engine of South East Asia. Instead, the country has suffered in the grips of a repressive military junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Concil (SLORC) for years. SLORC has held the elected leader of the country, Nobel Peace Prizewinner Aung San Suu Kyi (left), has been held under house arrest for more than a decade.
Last fall, the junta smashed monk-led street protests. Those protests were sparked by the soaring price of rice, but were popularly perceived as a challenge to the regime itself. An unknown number of monks and other civilians were killed, and many remain in detention.
Then came Cyclone Nargis with its 120 mile an hour winds.
On May 3, the cyclone swept through the Irrawaddy delta, a densely populated rice growing region, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Tens of thousands are dead. Survivors face poor sanitation, no shelter and a lack of drinking water. Outbreaks of malaria and dengue fever, as well as cholera and dysentery, are likely.
To top it off, the entire nation’s food security is now in jeopardy. The cyclone devastated area produces most of Burma’s rice and fish. Save the Children's Burma Representative Andrew Kirkwood has compared the scale of the disaster to the 2004 tsunami. The Food and Agriculture Organization today called for $10 million dollars of emergency assistance to farming and fishing communities. With climate change apparently well underway, we can expect more of these severe storms, and as always, it is the poorest who are most vulnerable.
Will help Reach Those in Need?
Astonishingly, in Burma, that vulnerability is being compounded by an irresponsible and unresponsive government. The SLORC government is preventing foreign aid workers from reaching those in jeopardy. Today, the United Nations announced that it is suspending relief efforts after SLORC seized U.N. rice stores and equipment. According to the World Food Program, the junta seized all of the food aid that the agency had managed to get into Burma.
Watching this humanitarian disaster unfold, I can’t help thinking that we are seeing the dark side of sovereignty. Is the international community really powerless to prevent the junta from refusing to admit foreign aid workers, and thwarting international relief efforts? The survivors of this disaster deserve better. France apparently agrees. According to the Daily Mail, France proposed invoking Security Council Resolution 1674, which articulates an international "responsibility to protect," to bypass the junta and deliver aid directly to those in need.

P.S.: By the way, I deliberately choose to call the country Burma, not Myanmar, because the name-change was a SLORC project, and has not been recognized by the opposition (the legally-elected government.) The UN may use Myanmar, but it will be Burma to me until the democratic opposition says otherwise.

Hunger “strikes”

And when it does, the hungry strike back. In Egypt in late March, at least 7 people died during an acute shortage of subsidized bread: long lines in the spring heat contributed to violence responsible for 2 deaths, while exhaustion and complications of other ailments killed 5 others. To avoid rioting, President Hosni Mubarak called out the army—not to quell violence, but to bake and distribute bread. In Haiti, where the price of rice doubled in a single week, demonstrations began on April 3, developing over the course of a week into violence, pillaging and the arrest of over 300. To calm things down, President René Préval announced he would lower the price by $8. Considering the extent of the problem, the solution is not at all adequate: 80% of Haiti’s population lives on less than $2/day, while the price of rice rose from $35 to $70 for 110-pound bag. Dropping it to $62 is not likely to appease anger or hunger for long. Especially since such hikes in prices are not solely due to the shortages of rice or wheat that we’ve all been hearing about. According to Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur for the right to food, the problem is structural: drought in Australia and increased consumption in China and India cannot be blamed entirely for the 52% increase in the price of rice over the last 2 months, nor the 84% hike in other cereal prices in 4 months. Obviously, the price of oil, and thus transportation, has to be figured in. And as the French weekly, the Canard Enchaîné pointed out, (sorry, no web link) trading commodities such as rice on the world market also shares responsibility for such precipitous rises in prices. Ziegler claims that the food riots we’re seeing are merely the tip of the iceberg of a coming catastrophe: before prices rose, children under age 10 died of hunger at the rate of 1 every 5 seconds and 854 million people were seriously under nourished. And with the United States now putting big bucks ($6 billion) into biofuels, 138 million tons of corn will be used to propel people rather than feed them. Serendipitously, as I was preparing this post yesterday, I received notice of a way we all can help: go to http://www.freerice.com/. I was told the site was created by a computer programmer who wanted to devise a way to help his son study for his SAT's (vocabulary portion) and do something to help end world hunger at the same time. It consists of a vocabulary test, on which you can preset the level or have it adjust automatically to suit all ages and levels. For every correct answer, the site’s sponsors donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food program (a quick check of the UN site shows that rice from Free Rice has been donated to at least Bangladesh & Myanmar so far). In just a few minutes, you can donate thousands of grains of rice (and improve your vocabulary to boot)!