@starvingAfrican |
I hear this phrased in more benign terms from some of the
nicest people I know. And, if you’re being completely objective, the question
of whether or not we should work to sustain a population of 7 billion and
growing is a valid question, worth considering. But if you decide that it’s
better for fewer people to be alive so that more of the living can have a
higher quality of life, you have put a rather heavy burden on yourself. You
have to choose who dies.
It’s been said that all great men are also bad men. If you
look at all of the presidents of the United States , no matter how you
rank them by greatness, all of them sent people to their death. Alexander THE
GREAT, killed a lot of people. Ghengis Khan decided that it would be better if
there were less Chinese and solved the problem the old fashion way. Recently,
more and more women are joining the ranks of great leaders. But most of don’t
think that way, and don’t have to.
It’s a little more benign to look at a population that is
struggling, perhaps starving and instead of asking if we should kill them, ask
how much help should we give them? Parents have to make that kind of decision
with their own children all the time. How long do you allow them to live in
your basement? Maybe a better analogy is our neighbors or friends. Do we keep
letting them borrow our tools and giving them cups of sugar, or do we start
dropping hints about their lifestyle choices?
If you just arrived here by spaceship and looked at the
situation, you might see a hopeless situation in sub-Saharan Africa
and wonder why any effort is being put into it. I could say those are not very
compassionate creatures in the spaceship, but that would be only focusing on
the compassion for the starving children in Africa .
Maybe those aliens are feeling compassion for the countries who can grow plenty
of food, but still need to consider how to take care of their own.
Now we’re into a classic moral dilemma of the choice of
killing one person or five. Most people want to find a way out of having to
make that decision.
The answer is easier than you might think. We didn’t just
arrive here on a spaceship. We have well documented history of how we ended up
with 2 billion people living on a few dollars a day.
One graphic example is Haiti . In the Western
Hemisphere full of prosperous nations and fertile land, they are
impoverished and hungry. Even on their little island, things get better just by
crossing the border into the Dominican
Republic . Both sides of that island get the
hurricanes and earthquakes, how can they be so different? The reasons go all
the way back to where Columbus happened to land and how Spain divided it up,
how they cut the trees in Haiti and shipped them off to Europe while the
Dominican Republic decided to create a slower growing but more sustainable
economy, but a big part of Haiti’s problems happened in my lifetime.
Haiti border with Dominican Republic |
Their problems are the result of a decision made early on
when America
first started sending food aid to other countries. The decision was to not
make aid a burden on our farmers. If we were to help other countries with
food, that should be something all of us participate in. To do that, our
government buys surplus commodities in years when yields are high. Instead of
letting the price drop so farmers lose money and even go bankrupt, we all buy
that surplus with our tax dollars. Some of it is stored and some is sent to
where there is drought or war or natural disasters or wherever there is need.
By
providing aid to Haiti
in the way we did, we made the work of all of those farmers worthless. It only
took one season for many, over half of them had no choice but to sell
everything, move to the city, try to find work, and take the handouts we gave
them. We destroyed what fragile agri-business they had.
www.acumen.org |
If you only take that spaceship view and ask why should we
help them when they are doing nothing for us, again, look at history. Look at
how we stripped resources from Haiti
and Africa not to mention exploiting their
labor. Europeans did not build the U.S. from a wilderness. It was
being farmed and managed long before we got here.
www.heifer.org |
We’re getting better at all of this. The Heifer project
doesn’t give away food, it makes a loan of living animals or farming supplies
with the expectation that will be paid back. And it usually is. Building
infrastructure doesn’t need to be done for free. It may seem strange to profit
from an impoverished population, but you’re wearing clothes and using
technology that does just that. It can be done in a way that grows their
economy and leads to sustainability instead of destroying whole environments.
Acumen and Oxfam have been doing this for a long time.
The original question then looms up again, but in different a
way. If we grow the economy in these
starved areas, won’t they just have more babies? Historically, the answer
to that is no. When people see a society that will care for them in old age,
they don’t have a bunch of children in the hopes a few of them will live and be
able to support them later. That’s the kind of decisions humans made for
hundreds and thousands of years. It’s why you are here, but we have better ways
of surviving now. When there is a middle class, when people can see a bright
future for their children, they have less of them. The phenomenon of well off
people having large families is very recent, and I hope it is isolated.
This has happened consistently for hundred of years, since we
have been transitioning from an agrarian society to an industrialized one and
hopefully now into a sustainable one. This is not a dream. It is not a fantasy.
It’s already being done in small ways. We don’t have to choose between our own
survival and the survival of millions of starving babies. Our actual choice is
between ignoring our neighbors or getting to know them and how what we do
affects them.
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