Betting on Famine by Jean Ziegler

Author:Jean Ziegler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595588616
Publisher: The New Press

19

“NATURAL” SELECTION REDUX

In the WFP’s dilapidated building in Rome there are two rooms where the fate—or, more concretely, the life or death—of hundreds of thousands of people is decided every day.

The first of these, the situation room, houses the WFP’s database. The WFP’s greatest power resides in its capacity to react as quickly as possible to disasters and to mobilize with minimal delay the ships, trucks, and planes needed to transport food and water indispensable to the survival of the victims of hunger. The WFP’s average reaction time is about forty-eight hours. The walls of the situation room are covered with enormous maps and screens. On the long black tables are piles of meteorological charts, satellite images, and so on. All the harvests everywhere in the world are monitored on a daily basis. The movements of locust swarms, the tariffs on maritime freight, and the prices of rice, wheat, corn, millet, barley, and palm oil on the Chicago Board of Trade commodities exchange and other agricultural commodities exchanges around the world, as well as many other economic variables—all are constantly scrutinized, studied, and analyzed. En route from Vietnam and the port of Dakar, for example, rice is at sea for six months. Changes in the cost of transportation play a crucial role. The predictable variations in the price of a barrel of oil constitute another element that is closely followed by the economists and specialists in transportation insurance who work in the WFP situation room. These specialists are highly effective, ready to deliver any information necessary even with the least advance warning.

The other strategy room at the WFP headquarters in Rome, even if much less impressive at first sight, and less busy with experts of all kinds, is the Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM) branch of the Food Security Analysis Unit, currently headed by the energetic Joyce Luma. There Luma’s team issues minutely detailed analyses that identify vulnerable groups on all five continents.

In a certain sense, Luma is tasked with establishing the hierarchy of extreme poverty. She works with all the other UN organizations, NGOs, churches, national ministries of health and of social affairs, and above all the regional and local WFP directors. In Cambodia, Peru, Bangladesh, Malawi, Chad, Sri Lanka, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Laos, and many other countries, she subcontracts field research to local NGOs. Armed with detailed questionnaires, the field researchers (usually women) go from village to village, shantytown to shantytown, hamlet to hamlet, interviewing heads of families, isolated individuals, and single mothers about their income, employment, food situation, illnesses afflicting their family, lack of water, and so on. The questionnaires generally comprise between thirty and fifty questions, all developed in Rome. Once they have been filled out, the questionnaires are returned to Rome to be analyzed by Luma and her team.

Elie Wiesel is certainly one of the greatest writers of our time. He is himself a survivor of the camps at Aushwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald. He has highlighted with particular clarity the nearly insurmountable contradiction that affects any discussion of the extermination camps.

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