Haiti

Food Riots and other choices

Raj — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:23:48 -0600

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere - three quarters of the population lives on less than two dollars a day.

Haitians have company - more than anyone thought. The news from the World Bank is that, cough, poverty might be more pervasive than they thought. Looking back at their figures, they've revised up their estimates of the number of people living in poverty from 985 million to 1.4 billion, a more than 40% increase.

The Bank's spin is that poverty is still lower now than it was in 1981, when there were 1.9 billion people living in poverty. But most of the world's reduction in poverty comes from China. Excluding China, world poverty fell from 40% to 30% over the past 25 years.
Read the full BBC report.

Worse, these figures don't include the recent increases in food prices. Poor people around the world, particularly in cities where you need money to buy food, are finding meals increasingly hard to come by. Ethiopia, as this report shows, is facing food price inflation of over 40%. Things are so hard that, in some cases, families are forced to choose which of their children they will save from hunger.

Some have taken to the streets rather than face this choice. In Haiti, as Reuters reports below, food riots have broken out again. Sadly, they're not likely to be the only ones we see as winter approaches. And, if you read French, you can see here how women are in the front lines not only of growing their own food, but in organising for it too... ... read more »

Behind the Scenes at a Food Riot

Raj — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:42:34 -0600

The excellent Avi Lewis, whose documentary with Naomi Klein -- The Take -- is well worth watching, has turned his attention to the struggles around rice in Haiti. Here, in seventeen minutes, is one of the best treatments of the recent food riots in Haiti, and their long history.

Update Find out more at the Haiti Action Committee ... read more »

Haiti and The King Canute of Food

Raj — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:38:54 -0600

I’m a little disappointed with The Observer today. I’d been holding back on posting all my thoughts about food riots so that I could pull them out of the hat today with a comment piece in their pages. My article began with worries about globalisation and the consequences of food riots in Haiti.

The piece was bumped yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday evening it was announced that the Haitian Prime Minister, Jacques Edouard Alexis, had been fired in a special session of the Haitian Senate because of the food riots.

Then Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, announced imminent global disaster from food price rises.

Since I’m still hoping that the piece will still appear somewhere, and since it now needs rewriting, I’ll not post it quite yet. But here’s what the stories of the price rises leave out, and why there’s reason to fear that Haiti’s fate is likely to be that of many other countries. ... read more »

How to Think About Food Riots

Raj — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:44:26 -0600

I just recorded a radio segment for The World with the splendid Lisa Mullins. I was there to talk about food riots. Unfortunately, I wasn't terribly coherent and, despite the skilled editing of the folk there, I worry that my butchery of the argument I was trying to make cannot be fixed.

I was trying to talk about Egypt, Haiti and Senegal, three places from which reporters were sending news. So here's my attempt at restitution - a short guide on how to think about the food riots. ... read more »