It is poverty to decide that a child must die

“It is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”
Mother Theresa of Calcutta

The “Money” section of Saturday’s Guardian newspaper had a half page article titled “The green revolution: Why wheat is luring the breadwinners” – which detailed how commodity dealers are taking advantage of the increase in global wheat prices.

“After making millions from pumping up the price of copper, zinc and other metals to record levels last year, speculators are piling into “soft” commodities such as wheat and corn amid drought warnings and global shortages”

Is this what they mean when they say the market will find solutions to the problems of global warming, fossil fuel decline etc.?

At present these increases in price are happily absorbed in the shopping baskets of the West, pence or cents on bread being almost invisible to all but the poorest parts of the American and European populations. The wholesale disengagement of price from value in the west, where discounting, loss leaders, sales, just-in-time delivery, e-commerce, globalised production, packaged products and services etc have confused everybody to the point of not understanding what anything is really worth anymore – have made the poorest parts of society practically blind to price rises in individual products too (Although Monday’s The Scotsman reports that “BREAD prices are set to burst through the £1-a-loaf barrier because of rising worldwide flour prices” seeing this as another burden on the British public already facing energy price rises, and increased mortgage payments due to interest rate rises). Avid readers will remember me touching on this issue last November.

In the Third World though these same price rises of staple foods can be devastating, and where they represent, as here, scarcity – inevitably lead to malnourishment, hunger and famine. If global climate change is responsible for the poor harvests, as it appears to be, then here we are seeing again how the poorest of the world, the wretched of the earth will feel the pain of our folly first.

Much is currently being written about how last years fall back in oil prices, reflected the Third World just being priced out of the market. Countries that cannot afford oil at $50 a barrel or above have just stopped buying - freeing up some supply for those who can, filling the gap between rising demand (in the West, China, India etc.) and static supply.

Climate change, peak oil – the world’s poor are acting as our buffer, but for how long? And what about the resulting effects – events on the Horn of Africa providing a current obvious example. Floods followed by drought in the late 1990s set the desperate stage for the actions that have followed in Somalia. The photograph of the dead child above is from the 1992 famine in Somalia, according to the World Health Organisation currently a quarter of Somali children die before reaching the age of five. Is it any wonder that people turn to extreme action, fundamentalist faiths in the face of this situation? As the USA bombs there, as another front of its “war on terror”, I wonder how many of the children who survive will grow up understanding their actions, understanding the behaviour of the West.