Stuck in the mud in Haiti

By Paul Haist

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The global food crisis has been attributed by some reliable and thoughtful news outlets to speculation across international markets compounded by the price of oil and the related conversion of cropland to bio-fuel production.

Not everyone agrees with that assessment, although it is noteworthy that at least some of those who disagree most volubly, such as Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, represent nations or organizations deeply committed to bio-fuel production. Brazil is the world’s leading exporter of ethanol and its No. 2 producer after the United States.

Driven by spiraling oil prices, cropland conversion is a natural economic choice. It is perfectly understandable that a corn farmer today would sell his crop to a higher paying ethanol maker than to a feed lot. The global impact of individual choice may not be readily apparent to everyone, including farmers.

Those individual decisions are abetted by national policies designed ostensibly and equally understandably to address the cost of oil.

Such policies here and abroad are not the cause but, rather, the consequence of market forces, a reaction to market forces.

The policies are not intrinsically bad, in the sense that they intentionally do harm, even though they may become in retrospect shortsighted or naive. At least they can be changed when they are fully and widely understood to be contrary to the public interest—although that does not always happen in U.S. politics.

The market forces are quite another matter. How do we change market forces?

When the media attribute the food crisis to market speculators, I wonder who those speculators are.

This reminds me of a joke of possibly dubious taste that arose from our fears a few years ago around the population explosion—that somewhere in the world a woman is giving birth every so many seconds—we just need to find her and stop her.

I have wanted to find the speculators and stop them because I agree with at least one other observer that they are perpetrating a crime against humanity.

A recent Nightly News Hour report showed mothers in Haiti making sun-dried cakes of slightly sweetened sandy mud to help stave off their children’s hunger. Intercut with images of rioting on the streets of Port-au-Prince, the pictures of the children eating those mud cakes were heart-wrenching.

For a mark, a yen, a buck or a pound the children of Haiti are eating mud. The suffering is not limited to Haiti.

The concept of the food crisis as a crime against humanity was given voice to recently by Jean Ziegler, the United Nations’ special reporter on the right to food. He made the remark to a German radio station April 14 and it was widely repeated in other media.

Brazil’s Silva dismissed Ziegler’s charge.

Ziegler focused on the issue of cropland conversion as the crime. In Silva’s defense, it was that fact that the Brazilian leader dismissed.

Ziegler got that part wrong, but only that part. Cropland conversion is, as noted, merely the consequence of economic forces, merely the consequence of speculation.

So, who is doing the speculating? Do they have an office in New York, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai?

Is there somewhere we can go and show the speculators the pictures of the children eating mud in Haiti and then insist—if it would still be necessary to insist after their having seen the pictures—to stop it, for God’s sake?

The Pogo axiom has been cited so often that its effect is not what it used to be, but it is nonetheless true in this case.

The speculators are not in investment offices and trading floors around the world. They are not the farmers who choose to sell their crops for fuel instead of food. They are not the presidents and legislators, economic planners and budget writers. Or they are not only them.

Walt Kelley was correct a half century or more ago and he is correct now: “We have met the enemy and they are us.”

Overstating a crisis, like cavalierly using the term Holocaust, is something we should avoid. Hyperbole diminishes or trivializes the overwhelming scale of some certain events in the history of humankind.

But it is very difficult to look at the pictures of children eating mud in Haiti and then to look at what I have thought of always as my own simple life and not be overwhelmed—not to speak to myself the word crime, and in a painfully literal sense.

Of what am I guilty? What have we done? What is humankind doing to itself?

If this is a crime against humanity, it is a self-inflicted wound.

It is us because this is less a crisis of hunger than it is a crisis of consumption. It is not a shortcoming of omission. It is a shortcoming of commission—something each of us does every day, many times, although not all of us may be aware of what we are doing.

Things are more than a little out of balance in the world.

How do we fix it? How do we heal the world?

The problem seems too big. But I know it is not up to them. It is up to me—you and me.

To heal the world we have to heal ourselves, which might begin with understanding and acknowledging our moral footprint on the world we share with the children of Haiti.

It’s a big order and, I am sad to say, optimism in my heart is about as hard to come by as a good meal in the slums of Port-au-Prince.