Queues for petrol on British petrol station forecourts appear to bear scant relation to ongoing killing, rape and mass refugee movements in eastern Congo. The unfolding humanitarian disaster in ungoverned Somalia likewise seems unconnected to Western taxpayers’ worries about falling mortgage lending and rising prices.
But as Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General, pointed out this week, it is those least able to cope who will be hardest hit by rocketing food and energy costs and a global economic slowdown. The world faced “the spectre of widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale”. In short the poor will inherit the dearth.
Developments in the DRC vividly illustrate how interlinked these supposedly disparate problems are. And they offer clues as to why, perhaps, the developed world should worry more about the unfortunates of North Kivu province and less about the motorists of British suburbia or the credit-squeezed homeowners of Pretoria.
Despite an eastern Congo peace deal, which was signed in January, fighting is continuing in a country that has had more than its share. In a statement last month 63 leading NGOs appealed for help. “Since the signing scores of civilians have been killed, hundreds of women and girls raped and many more children recruited into armed service.”
About 1,1-million people are displaced in North and South Kivu, the statement said. “Malnutrition, cholera, malaria and other preventable diseases are taking their lives at an alarming rate … This is a humanitarian catastrophe on an enormous scale.”
According to John Holmes, the UN’s humanitarian aid chief, the steep rises in food staple prices plus factors such as higher fuel costs for transportation are dramatically increasing the vulnerability of disadvantaged population groups, such as those in the Kivus, whether they inhabit conflict zones or not.
“Millions will eat less, millions will eat less well, millions will face extra nutritional stress,” he said.
That, in turn, could have “dramatic effects” on the mental and physical health of children, disease prevention and education because a greater proportion of income would be spent on food, Holmes said. At the same time, these pressures create social and political instability, sparking or exacerbating DRC-like conflicts over resources, land and water.
While countries such as France propose extra subsidies and protectionist measures to shelter their more affluent populations, belt-tightening is not an option at the end of the food chain. Economists say more than one billion people live on $1 a day. In many developing countries up to three-quarters of income is spent on food.
In El Salvador, for example, the poorest are eating only half as much as they did a year ago. At the same time, rice prices have reportedly risen 140% this year alone.
In Somalia, where the UN says 1,8-million people require humanitarian assistance and 700 000 people have fled the capital Mogadishu, the agony of war, hunger and illness is being intensified by a protracted, devastating drought linked to global warming.
But this sort of problem is becoming the “new normal”. Holmes said nine out of 10 natural disasters are weather-related.
Rising sea levels, flooding, crop failures, famines and water shortages create 50-million more migrants every year. Yet climate change is directly linked to the carbon-emitting, gas-guzzling, high-end consumerism of developed countries that now fret most about energy costs.
Solutions, whole or partial, are not entirely lacking. Ban wants to make a start at a food security summit in Rome next month and is calling on heads of state and government to rally round. — Â