Position Haiti at the epicenter of a U.S. war on hunger
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By DeWayne Wickham
Before Emira Woods arrived in Haiti last week, she had heard the stories about people there making a meal out of dirt. But as dire as the food crisis is in that impoverished Caribbean nation, she wondered whether such accounts were overblown.
“I wanted to see to what extend it was sensationalized, and to what extent it was real,” Woods said Sunday, as she recounted to me her visit to Cit é Soleil, a notorious slum on the western edge of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.
“The first thing we heard was that … for many people without access to food this was a way to survive,” said Woods, a senior official of the Institute for Policy Studies. “So it was very much real, this notion of eating mud cakes.”
In fact, it was both real and surreal.
Like the thin, square-shaped synthetic food that was the staple of millions of starving people in the 1973 movie Soylent Green, Haiti’s mud cookies are the product of a world teetering on the brink of global famine — a world in which basic foodstuffs are in short supply.
Also in short supply is the patience of hungry people in places such as Haiti, where food riots occurred last month. The roaming mobs have given Port-au-Prince the real-life look of the movie’s fictional portrayal of New York City in 2022.
In Soylent Green, New Yorkers — and people in much of the rest of the world — have been reduced to eating a synthetic form of plankton (made of human flesh, it turned out) after the naturally produced plankton is found to be in short supply. In the world of that sci-fi movie, meat, vegetables and fruit are scarce. Only the very rich can get that stuff — and then only in small amounts.
Ironically, a New York Times review of Soylent Green panned the possibility of such a widespread food shortage. “There is, of course, every reason to view the next century with some fear,” the reviewer said. “But Soylent Green projects essentially simple, muscular melodrama a good deal more effectively than it does the potential of man’s seemingly witless destruction of the earth’s resources.”
As it has turned out, the human capacity for self-destructive behavior is greater than that movie review was able to imagine 35 years ago. “Prices of the staples we all depend on for a healthy diet, like eggs, bread, milk, fruits, are rising by eye-popping leaps and bounds,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, said last week as he opened a hearing on this nation’s skyrocketing food costs.
Last month, Josette Sheeran, head of the United Nations World Food Program, said 34 nations “have seen thousands of hungry people pour onto the streets demanding relief.”
What’s to blame for the creeping food shortage? There’s a long list of suspects: drought, overpopulation, global warming, surging demand for and rising price of oil (which makes processing and transporting food more costly), government mismanagement of agricultural policies, and man’s age-old inhumanity to man — war.
In Haiti, there is a confluence of all these factors. Once a rich, self-sufficient nation, “Haiti is the epicenter of the global food crisis and Cité Soleil is point zero,” said Woods.
Last week, President Bush asked Congress for an additional $770 million to help feed the world’s hungry. In all, Bush said, the United States will give $5 billion in 2008 and 2009 to combat hunger.
That’s a good thing. But the Bush administration could make an even greater contribution by coming up with a plan to wipe out hunger at its epicenter — in Haiti. Given this country’s history of heavy-handed involvement in Haiti’s domestic affairs and the ineffective government the Bush administration has foisted on the Haitian people, such a move would be a great victory in the fight against global hunger.
DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.
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