Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (134): Famine in China

Famished Chinese child dying in a gutter, by George Silk 1946

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by George Silk 1946

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These images are not from the more infamous famine that occurred during the Great Leap Forward.

George Silk was a LIFE Magazine staffer, working for them 30 years. He extensively covered many aspects of the second world war, at one point being even captured by the Germans, and then fortunately escaping. He was also the first photographer to document Nagasaki after the atomic bombing. Immediately after the war, he was in China recording the poor social conditions and the lack of resources and its devastating effects on the Chinese populace. (source)

More iconic images of human rights violations. More about famine.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (118): Bengal Famine

Bengal Famine 1943, by William Vandivert

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Read the whole story here. More on famines. More iconic images of human rights violations.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (114): Child Starves to Death in the UK

banksy’s beggar

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The government has been warned it must urgently fix flaws in its support system for successful asylum seekers, after a destitute child starved to death in temporary accommodation in Westminster. … [T]he family had become dependent on “ad hoc” charitable handouts despite a successful asylum claim because of “significant problems” transferring the family from Home Office to mainstream welfare support services. The family of three was forced to “actually become homeless” before local authorities could offer official help. (source)

Brings to mind this older post. More absurd human rights violations here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (94): Ethiopian Famine of 1984

Ethiopian famine of 1984, by Stan Grossfeld

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“We snuck in on a food convoy. The convoy would travel at night and during the day they’d cover it up because Ethiopian MiGs would blow it up if they saw it.”

It is 1984 when Stan Grossfeld and Boston Globe reporter Colin Nickerson discover the harsh reality of famine and politics in Ethiopia. The country’s drought is in its fourth year. The crop has failed. The livestock are dead. Hundreds of thousands of people abandon their farms and villages and set out, looking for food.

There is little to be found. Some 130,000 tons of food from the United States have been held up by the Ethiopian government, which is determined to starve the rebel-held countryside into submission. Starve the people do — half a million Ethiopians, many of them children so hungry their bodies literally consume themselves. I’ll never forget the sounds of kids dying of starvation. They sound like cats wailing.” For Grossfeld, the experience is overwhelming: “You try to be a technician and look through the viewfinder; sometimes the viewfinder fills up with tears.”

At a feeding station in the Tigray Province, Grossfeld photographs a child licking a flour sack. “I remember that kid,” says Grossfeld. “He might have survived. He was smart enough to lick the sack.” But for others, there is no hope. Grossfeld photographs this starving mother and child waiting in line for food in Wad Sharafin Camp. Hours later, the child is dead. (source)

Read the whole story here. More on famine. More iconic images of human rights violations.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (84): Starving Girl in Nigeria

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This image by Lyle Conrad, taken in the late 1960s, shows a seated, listless child, who was among many kwashiorkor cases found in Nigerian relief camps during the Nigerian–Biafran war. Kwashiorkor is a disease brought on due to a severe dietary protein deficiency.

More on the right to food. More iconic images of rights violations.

Human Rights Ads (77): Famine in Our Backyard

“would you care more if it happened on your doorstep?”

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More on famine, hunger, the right to food, and the role of distance in morality. More human rights ads.

Measuring Human Rights (25): Measuring Hunger

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First, and for those in doubt: hunger is a human rights violations (see article 25 of the Universal Declaration). Second, before we discuss ways to measure this violation, we have to know what it is that we want to measure. It’s surprisingly difficult to define hunger.

Definition of hunger

The word “hunger” in this context does not refer to the subjective sensation that we have when lunch is late. We’re talking here about a chronic lack of food or a sudden and catastrophic lack of food (as in the case of a famine). We measure a lack of food by measuring dietary energy deficiency, which in turn is computed based on average daily calorie intake. The FAO estimates that the average minimum energy requirement per person is 1800 kcal per day. The global average per capita daily calorie intake is currently about 2800 kcal. This average obviously masks extreme differences between the obese and the chronically undernourished.

The FAO minimum energy requirement per person of 1800 kcal is also an average. The minimum calorie need depends on many things: age, climate, health, height, occupation etc.

Usually, the concept of “hunger” as it is defined here is different from “malnutrition“. Hunger is a lack of food defined as a lack of calorie intake. Malnutrition is a lack of quality food, of micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals, and of a divers diet. Hence, people may have access to sufficient quantities of food and still be malnourished.

Hunger and famine are also different concepts. Hunger is a chronic and creeping lack of food, while a famine results from the sudden collapse of food stocks. A famine implies widespread starvation during a limited period. It can’t go on forever because it must stop when everyone has died or when food supplies are restored. Chronic hunger on the other hand can go on forever because it doesn’t imply widespread starvation. Of course, people do die of chronic hunger, and on a global level hunger kills more people than famines do. But whereas in the case of famine people die of starvation, the victims of chronic hunger usually don’t starve to death. When we say that hunger kills someone every 3.6 seconds we usually mean that this person dies from an infectious disease brought on by hunger. Hunger increases people’s vulnerability to diseases which are otherwise nonfatal (e.g. diarrhea, pneumonia etc.). In fact, most hunger related deaths do not occur during famines. Chronic hunger is much more deadly – it’s just not as noticeable as a famine. When and where famines occur, they are more deadly and catastrophic. But they occur, thank God, only exceptionally. Hunger on the other hand is a permanent fixture of the lives of millions and ubiquitous in many countries.

"dying child" by Jac Saorsa

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Measurement of hunger

Given this definition, how do we go about and measure the extent of chronic hunger? (The measurement of famine is a separate problem, discussed here). There are different possible methods:

• So-called food intake surveys (FIS) estimate dietary intake and try to relate this to energy needs determined by physical activity. Calorie intake below a minimum level means hunger. The problem here is that minimum calorie intake thresholds are somewhat arbitrary and do not always take people’s different calorie requirements into account. Even for a single individual, this threshold can vary over time (depending on the climate, the individual’s age, occupation and health etc.). Moreover, when trying to measure calorie intake, you’re faced with the problem of hunger due to imperfect absorption: it’s not because someone in a sample buys and consumes x number of calories that he or she actually absorbs those calories. The widespread incidence of diarrhea and other health problems often mean that only a fraction of calories eaten are absorbed by the body.
• In order to bypass this, some propose a measurement method based on revealed preferences. The greater the share of calories people receive from the cheapest foods available to them, the hungrier they are; and, conversely, the more they buy expensive sources of calories, the less hungry they are. Their choice of foods reveals whether they have enough calories. This method therefore eliminates the threshold and absorption problems.

Our approach derives from the fact that when a person is below their nutrition threshold, there is a large utility penalty due to the physical discomfort associated with the body’s physiological and biochemical reaction to insufficient nutrition. At this stage, the marginal utility of calories is extremely high, so a utility-maximizing consumer will largely choose foods that are the cheapest available source of calories, typically a staple like cassava, rice or wheat. However, once they have passed subsistence, the marginal utility of calories declines significantly and they will begin to substitute towards foods that are more expensive sources of calories but that have higher levels of non-nutritional attributes such as taste. Thus, though any individual’s actual subsistence threshold is unobservable, their choice to switch away from the cheapest source of calories reveals that their marginal utility of calories is low and that they have surpassed subsistence. Accordingly, the percent of calories consumed from the staple food source, or the staple calorie share (SCS), can be used as an indicator for nutritional sufficiency. (source, source)

• Still another method consists of measuring hunger’s physical effects on growth and thinness. Instead of measuring calorie intake, hunger or revealed preferences, you measure people’s length, their stunted growth and their body mass index. However, this is very approximative since length and weight may be determined by lots of factors, many of them unrelated to hunger.
• And finally there are subjective approaches. The WFP does surveys asking people how often they ate in the last week and what they ate, how often they skip meals, how far they are away from markets, if their hunger is temporary or chronic etc. Gallup does something similar.

More on hunger here. More data here. And more posts in this series here.

Human Rights Maps (163): Food Security and Food Spending

The Food Security Risk Index (FSRI), released by Maplecroft, is a combination of 12 indicators, measuring the availability, access and stability of food supplies across all countries, as well as the nutritional and health status of populations. Risk factors include conflict, displacement, low capacity to combat the effects of extreme weather events such as drought, water shortages, land degradation, prevalence of poverty and failing infrastructures undermining both food production and emergency food distribution capacity. In 2011, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo ranked lowest in the world:

Food Security Risk Index map 2011

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A somewhat related map, showing the percentages of food spending in total spending:

(source, source, click image to enlarge)

In general, a higher percentage means more average poverty. And also higher vulnerability. If you spend 50% rather than only 10% of your income on food, you’ll be hit much harder by price hikes or income loss. And, as a result, your food supply is much more insecure.

Maps on hunger here and here. More human rights maps here.

Measuring Human Rights (22): When Can You Call Something a “Famine”?

Scene from the famine of 1921-1923 in Soviet Russia

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With yet another famine in the Horn of Africa, perhaps it’s a good time for a few words about famine measurement.

People have a right to adequate nourishment and to be free from chronic hunger (see article 25 of the Universal Declaration). Starvation is an extreme form of violation of this right (and is obviously also a violation of the right to life). So we obviously want to know the existence and extent of cases of starvation. There are individual cases of starvation – a elderly person who has lost her mobility and social network may starve abandoned in her flat – but most cases involve large scale famines. Let’s focus on the latter.

The problem is that death by famine or starvation is difficult to identify. People suffering from extreme malnutrition often don’t die of hunger but of diseases provoked by malnutrition, such as pneumonia or diarrhea. Since those are diseases that can have other causes besides malnutrition, it’s often difficult to count the number of people who have died from malnutrition. Their body weight may tell us something, but you can’t go about weighing corpses on a large scale.

Hence it’s difficult to determine whether or not a famine has occurred or is occurring. When does widespread suffering of hunger become a famine? Not every food crisis or widespread occurrence of malnutrition leads to famine-type starvation. A famine is obviously characterized by mortality caused by malnutrition. So we must look at mortality rates, but given the difficulty of establishing whether deaths are caused by malnutrition or other factors, how do we decide that a certain mortality rate is caused by malnutrition and is therefore the symptom of a famine? It’s difficult.

And yet, it’s common to find newspaper reports about “an outbreak of famine” is this or other part of the world. Ideally, we only want to declare a famine when a famine is actually occurring or about to occur. False alarms are not only silly but they create indifference. Fortunately, people seem to have overcome some of the difficulties and have agreed on a non-arbitrary way to determine that there is a famine going on:

• when overall mortality rates in a region are extremely high, or high compared to the baseline – which may itself be high already, perhaps because of a war (a mortality rate of at least two people per 10,000 per day is usually considered part of the evidence of famine conditions)
• when this is combined with survey indicators about low food availability and malnutrition (a rate of malnutrition – ratio of weight to height – among children age six months to five years above an average of 30% is the usual measure here)
• when there is anecdotal evidence (perhaps also from surveys)
• and when there are proxy measures such as below average rainfall

then you can build a useful measurement and a more or less scientific way of ascertaining that a food crisis has passed the famine threshold.

the McAfrica, not one of McDonalds' best decisions

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None of this should be understood as implying that food crises which don’t reach the famine threshold are unimportant and don’t deserve attention or assistance. It only means that it’s a good thing to distinguish real famines from lesser crises and to avoid crying wolf.

One problem with the measurement system presented above is that it’s no help in preventing a famine. It’s difficult to turn it into a probability index rather than a threshold index. It tells you when a famine has occurred or is ongoing, not when there’s a risk of famine. When mortality rates are high, you’re already late, perhaps too late.

More posts in this series are here. More on famine here.

The Causes of Poverty (48): Overpopulation

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It looks like we’re about to have another large famine, and so – right on cue – we’re hearing the familiar chorus of overpopulation. Equally predictable, I promised myself that this will be the last time that I drag my feet towards yet another rebuke of the Malthusians whose visions of the human flood always seem to cloud their perception of the facts.

The world’s population is estimated to continue its current growth path and to reach 9 billion in 2050, after which stabilization and even decline are likely. Those worrying about overpopulation claim that we can’t possible feed all those new people and that a decline in the numbers, if it will come, will come too late. A Malthusian catastrophe is inevitable without strong measures to reduce the number of human beings. However, that turns out to be a very simplistic assumption. There’s no good reason why humanity can’t feed one or two billion more members:

So long as plant breeding efforts are not hampered and modern agricultural technology continues to be available to farmers, it should be possible to produce yield increases that are large enough to meet some of the predictions of world food needs, even without having to devote more land to arable agriculture. (source)

The latter point also debunks the myth that population growth will inevitably mean increased deforestation and desertification.

Likewise, an excess number of people in a certain area isn’t the cause of current food shortages, and neither was it the cause of historic famines. A combination of climate factors, bad governance and infrastructure, the failure or inability to adopt modern farming technologies and panic hoarding produced those shortages. (Read also the work of Amartya Sen if you haven’t already done so).

If food production can keep up with expected population growth, maybe the problem is water. There’s indeed a water crisis in many parts of the world, but again it’s not population numbers that create the problem, but inefficient irrigation, excessive meat consumption and careless use. Rather than trying to limit the world’s population – which is very difficult anyway because it seems to require dictatorial government and has unexpected harmful consequences – one should tackle inefficiency and waste and focus on the development and improvement of fresh water production. Those objectives are eminently doable.

So, if water and food will be OK – notwithstanding the odd local famine that is likely to occur with any given number of human beings populating the earth – maybe a general increase of the world’s population will lead to pressures on poor countries’ healthcare systems? More children without extended healthcare systems means increased child and maternal mortality. However, current population increases go hand in hand with radical improvements in child and maternal mortality rates, so why would future increases be any different?

And don’t get me started on migration flows. The supposed harm done by migration is one of the biggest lies out there, on a par with overpopulation rhetoric.

(image source)

More on overpopulation here.

Human Rights Maps (133): Stalin’s Terror Famine in Ukraine (Holodomor)

The Holodomor (a Ukrainian word for  “death by hunger”) was a famine in the Ukraine from 1932–1933, during which millions of inhabitants died of starvation (estimates range from 2.6 million to 10 million).

Scholars disagree about the causes of the famine: natural factors, bad economic policies and deliberately engineered measures are possible factors. Some have argued that the famine may have been provoked as an attack on the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, and therefore that it falls under the legal definition of genocide. Hence the expression “terror-famine”. Others blame unwise policies of industrialization and collectivization of farming.

These are the countries that do recognize it as a genocide:

Countries which officially recognize the Holodomor as genocide

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This map shows the population decline during the famine:

rate of population decline during the Holodomor Famine map

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More on famine. More human rights maps.

Related Articles

• YES: Stalin killed millions. A Stanford historian answers the question, was it genocide? Naimark… (pajamasmedia.com)
• Who’s Afraid of Ukrainian History? (nybooks.com)

Human Rights Ads (59): See How Easy Feeding the Hungry Can Be?

(source, Advertising Agency: TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris, Johannesburg, South Africa Executive Creative Director: Damon Stapleton Creative Directors: Adam Weber, Hennie Stander Art Director: Wihan Meerholz Copywriter: Dan Parmenter Photographer: Seppi Hochfellner Released: May 2008)

More on hunger and charity. More human rights ads.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (56): Food Theft in Sudan

Food theft in Sudan

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1998 picture by British photojournalist Tom Stoddart traveling with Medicins Sans Frontieres. More on Sudan, famine and development aid. More iconic images of human rights violations are here.

Related Articles

• UK should not put trade with Sudan ahead of human rights | Tom Porteous (guardian.co.uk)
• South Sudan LRA rebel raids rise (bbc.co.uk)
• donate to Oxfam, Unicef and/or Medicins Sans Frontieres

Human Rights Maps (105): Human Rights Violations Because of Overpopulation?

Personally, I don’t believe overpopulation is a concept that has a lot of explanatory value, but many people believe that rights violations such as poverty, famine and war are caused primarily if not exclusively by overpopulation. And not just regional overpopulation in certain pockets of the earth where water and food are scarce, but overpopulation as a planetary problem. There are supposed to be too many people in the world for peaceful coexistence and sustainable food production, perhaps even for the survival of humanity. The areas of the world which are inhabitable and usable for agriculture are said to be too small compared to the number of people living in them.

I won’t repeat my arguments against these claims (if you want you can read them here). I’ll just use the occasion to post a few maps showing the world’s population. I know, this is no proof for or against overpopulation theories, but the maps are simply too beautiful to miss. For those who think we’re running out of space:

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The same message can be conveyed by the following maps:

Obviously, not all the non-dotted areas are inhabitable, but still, the open space is vast. Another way to present this:

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The following map shows areas in the world where there are at least 15 people per square kilometer:

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These may also be interesting:

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More human rights maps are here (most of those are more intimately connected to human rights than the ones above).

Related Articles

• Top 10: the world’s most overpopulated countries (newstatesman.com)
• John Lennon: Overpopulation is a Myth (cherylcline.wordpress.com)
• “Man obsessed with overpopulation terrorizes Discovery Channel” and related posts (americanfreethought.com)

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (55): Famine in Bihar

Werner Bischof's photo of the famine in Bihar

(source, more on Werner Bischof and on the famine in Bihar)

More on famine and on India. Other iconic images of rights violations are here.

The Causes of Poverty (36): Overpopulation (Because the Extent of Wrongness in Overpopulation Discourse is an Infinite Number)

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I never cease to be amazed by the persistence of overpopulation discourse in the face of irrefutable counter-evidence. The coming explosion of the population bomb is predicted time and again, with the same accuracy as the Christian Apocalypse. The spectacular failure of Paul Ehrlich‘s predictions in 1968, for example, seems to have had the same dissuasive effect on overpopulation discourse as Obama’s birth certificate on a large part of the Republican Party. Look at some of these statements:

Paul Ehrlich

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate … India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980 … One general prediction can be made with confidence: the cost of feeding yourself and your family will continue to increase. There may be minor fluctuations in food prices, but the overall trend will be up … The United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years by 1980 because of pesticide usage, and the nation’s population would drop to 22.6 million by 1999. (source)

Most of these statements are regularly repeated in some form or other, even today. Now, confront this with the following basic facts:

When Paul Ehrlich wrote his famous book ["The Population Bomb"], women were having an average around the world of five or six children; now they’re having an average of 2.6. Fertility rates around the world have halved. That’s not just true in Europe and North America; they’re way below replacement levels in most of East Asia now. Not just China but Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Burma have replacement rates of fertility or below. Around the world, fertility rates have been coming down really sharply. So the population bomb as we’ve conceived it before really isn’t there. There’s still population growth going on, but that’s going to stabilize. … birthrates are coming down fast, with Indian women, for instance, having fewer than three children on average today; and even African women have falling fertility. Fred Pearce (source)

What’s causing this population bust?

[T]hanks to advances in sanitation and medicine, women no longer need to have five or six children to make sure that two of them will live to adulthood. … Urbanization is a factor. When you’re in the countryside, your kids are an economic resource very early. They can help in the fields, they can look after the animals; there are piles of stuff they can do from the age of 4 or 5. Kids are an economic resource, which is why rural families tend to be larger. Fred Pearce (source)

More on fertility rates and overpopulation is here. Now, you could argue that even with falling fertility rates overpopulation can still be a problem. Heck, even with falling population rates you could say that there’s still overpopulation. Overpopulation is then a problem of relative population numbers rather than absolute numbers: if there are more people than the number that can be fed, then you have overpopulation. But this is also wrong: planet earth could feed a number of people that’s a lot higher than the current number.

Africa faces a food crisis, but it’s not because the continent’s population is growing faster than its potential to produce food, as vintage Malthusians such as environmental advocate Lester Brown and advocacy organizations such as Population Action International would have it. Food production in Africa is vastly less than the region’s known potential, and that is why so many millions are going hungry there. African farmers still use almost no fertilizer; only 4 percent of cropland has been improved with irrigation; and most of the continent’s cropped area is not planted with seeds improved through scientific plant breeding, so cereal yields are only a fraction of what they could be. Africa is failing to keep up with population growth not because it has exhausted its potential, but instead because too little has been invested in reaching that potential. (source, source)

Famines in general have causes that are completely unrelated to overpopulation. Read more here.

Overpopulation discourse isn’t just the proverbial barking up the wrong tree; it’s keeping company with some seriously rotten fruit. Look who else worried about overpopulation:

What was Hitler’s argument for attacking other countries? You might think he didn’t have one, but he did. His argument is frankly Malthusian: Our population is growing, and we will run out of food unless we get more land. …

The annual increase of population in Germany amounts to almost 900,000 souls. The difficulties of providing for this army of new citizens must grow from year to year and must finally lead to a catastrophe, unless ways and means are found which will forestall the danger of misery and hunger. Hitler in Mein Kampf

Hitler then reviews various policies to deal with the threat of over-population:

1. Artificial birth control. Hitler rejects this because it short-circuits natural selection. Furthermore, there is an international prisoners’ dilemma: The one country that lets its numbers rise will outnumber and militarily dominate the rest…

2. Increasing productivity via “internal colonization.” Hitler rejects this on a priori Malthusian grounds – there is no way for productivity to permanently outpace population growth:

Adolf Hitler

It is certainly true that the productivity of the soil can be increased within certain limits; but only within defined limits and not indefinitely. By increasing the productive powers of the soil it will be possible to balance the effect of a surplus birth-rate in Germany for a certain period of time, without running any danger of hunger. But we have to face the fact that the general standard of living is rising more quickly than even the birth rate. The requirements of food and clothing are becoming greater from year to year and are out of proportion to those of our ancestors of, let us say, a hundred years ago. It would, therefore, be a mistaken view that every increase in the productive powers of the soil will supply the requisite conditions for an increase in the population. Hitler in Mein Kampf

3. Acquire new territory outside of Europe. The problem with this plan, says Hitler, is that other European countries have already taken the good non-European land. So you would have to attack European countries to get the land:

In the nineteenth century it was no longer possible to acquire such colonies by peaceful means. Therefore any attempt at such a colonial expansion would have meant an enormous military struggle. Consequently it would have been more practical to undertake that military struggle for new territory in Europe rather than to wage war for the acquisition of possessions abroad. Hitler in Mein Kampf

4. Acquire new territory inside Europe. At last, a solution to the imbalance between people and land that Hitler likes! And of course, he doesn’t contemplate buying the land:

Of course people will not voluntarily make that accommodation. At this point the right of self-preservation comes into effect. And when attempts to settle the difficulty in an amicable way are rejected the clenched hand must take by force that which was refused to the open hand of friendship. If in the past our ancestors had based their political decisions on similar pacifist nonsense as our present generation does, we should not possess more than one-third of the national territory that we possess to-day and probably there would be no German nation to worry about its future in Europe. Hitler in Mein Kampf (source)

Of course, you can’t judge people by the company they keep, especially not if it’s involuntary company. One wouldn’t want to commit the error of reductio ad hitlerum or fall into the trap of Godwin’s Law. It’s not because a stupid or despicable person happens to believe something that it’s necessarily wrong and that other people should feel the need to reject their beliefs simply because they are shared by someone like Hitler (I am and will continue to be a vegetarian for instance).

However, I think it should at least worry those who talk about overpopulation that they share the same concerns with a genocidal fool who was genocidal precisely because of those concerns. Maybe there is some kind of link between those concerns and genocide. Also, it should worry them that genocidal war for Lebensraum is only the most unlikely perverse effect of concerns about overpopulation. Look for example at the effects of the one-child policy in China on gender balances (something which has been called a kind of genocide, not without reason).

Jonathan Swift

As a throwaway, a satirical quote from Jonathan Swift’s 1729 work “A Modest Proposal“, suggesting feeding the children of poor Roman Catholic families to wealthy Protestant landowners to deal with Ireland’s unsustainable population growth:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.

More on overpopulation is here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (49): Sudanese Girl Dying of Hunger as a Vulture Patiently Waits

(photo by Kevin Carter, a South African photographer who committed suicide in 1994, only a year after taking this Pulitzer Prize-winning photo)

Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried. “He was depressed afterward. He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter.”

The haunting image made Carter a global celebrity, but it also raised uncomfortable questions about whether he should have helped the girl rather than simply watching her die. To be sure, Carter had plenty of emotional and financial problems, and he drank and used drugs excessively. But’s it’s not hard to imagine that his world-famous photo left him wracked with guilt, contributing to his suicidal state of mind. In his rambling final note, he wrote, “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.” (source)

There’s obviously a moral dilemma here, one which always occurs in disaster journalism: drop the camera and help (but what can you do?), or be a witness and mobilize the world (but will it listen?). What’s best? If you’re interested, we have a blog series going on about moral dilemmas. More on journalism here.

Why is this an iconic image of human rights violations? Isn’t famine just a natural disaster for which no one is responsible, like an earthquake? I explained here why this is not the case, why famines happen because of what people do or fail to do.

UPDATE: a reader, Anthony Ratay, writes:

I wanted to let you know that there is some conflicting information out about the fate of the small Sudanese girl in the photograph.  Featured in the documentary “Under Fire”  Paul Watson claims that this girl was eventually given medical attention and prevented from an untimely demise. In fact if you look at the photo in its original frame you can see humanitarian workers in the background.

More about famines, or about Sudan. More iconic images of human rights violations.

Human Rights Poem (77): Once in Awhile a Protest Poem (Famine)

Once in Awhile a Protest Poem, by David Axelrod

Over and over again the papers print
the dried out tit of an African woman
holding her starving child. Over
and over, cropping it each time to one
prominent, withered tit, the feeble
infant face. Over and over to toughen
us, teach us to ignore the foam turned
dusty powder on the infant’s lips,
the mother’s sunken face (is cropped)
and filthy dress. The tit remains;
the tit held out for everyone to see,
reminding us only that we are not so hungry
ogling the tit, admiring it and in our
living rooms, making it a symbol of starving
millions; our sympathy as real as silicone.

More on famine and on disaster pornography. More human rights poems.

The Causes of Poverty (31): Overpopulation and Food Shortages

I’ve made my views on overpopulation abundantly clear on this blog. In short: I think it’s a silly and simplistic explanation of the world’s problems, hysterical at best and damaging when it inspires public policy. I don’t deny that it can cause problems when we look at local areas: there can be too many people in a certain area compared to the locally available stocks of food and water. But the problems there aren’t caused by “overpopulation” but by inadequate distribution of goods, wasteful use of goods etc. But if you think all this is BS,  do go and read my previous posts for a more thoughtful discussion of the issues.

How is overpopulation a human rights issue? Well, if you believe overpopulation is a problem, you will probably have some of the following reasons for your beliefs:

• Overpopulation may cause poverty, hunger and water shortages. And poverty, hunger and water are human rights issues – see here, here and here respectively.
• Overpopulation may cause violence and war. No need to argue the link with human rights I believe.
• Overpopulation may cause refugee flows. Immigration can cause a wide variety of human rights issues, going from xenophobia and discrimination to poverty and exclusion. More about this here.

Personally, I think that all of those problems are real, but that they have other more important causes. Take food shortages for instance:

[F]ood availability can be significantly increased, at minimal cost, by simply reducing agricultural waste … As an engineer, I regularly travel to sort out post-harvest problems and I am convinced that there is little benefit to be gained from merely increasing farm production without making considerable improvements to post-harvest systems and facilities.

The majority of grain and vegetable stores in east Europe date back to the 1930s, in design if not in construction, and they are truly and hopelessly insufficient, amounting to losses of some 15m-25m tonnes of grain annually. India loses 40m tonnes of fruits and vegetables as well as 21m tonnes of wheat a year because of inadequate storage and distribution. To put that in perspective, India’s wheat wastage each year is almost equal to Australia’s entire production of wheat.

In South-East Asia 37% of rice is lost between field and table; in China the figure is up to 45% and in Vietnam it can be as high as 80%. This loss of 150m tonnes of rice each year represents a waste of resources on a truly massive and unsustainable scale.

In America and Britain the buying habits of the big supermarkets actually encourage waste. They impose draconian penalties on suppliers for failing to deliver agreed quantities of fresh fruits and vegetables during the year, which force farmers to grow a much bigger crop than they need as a form of insurance against poor weather and other factors that may reduce their yield.

Even worse, 30% of what is harvested never reaches the supermarket shelf owing to trimming, quality selection, etc. Of the food that does reach the supermarket, up to half is thrown away by the consumer. David Williams (source)

Overpopulation isn’t the cause of food shortages, and population control measures, such as sterilization, offspring limitation, anti-sex policies etc. aren’t the solutions. And if you don’t believe me, read the work of Amartya Sen on the link (or better the absence of a link) between food supplies, population and famines (see also here):

Amartya Sen convincingly refuted the claim that either food supply or population had anything to do with famine.  Famines regularly occurred at times and places where food was plentiful, and in the most thinly populated places, like Darfur. Nick Cullather (source)

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (21): The North Korean Famine

The North Korean famine

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From 1995 to 1997, famine raged in North Korea. According to a report by North Korea’s Public Security Ministry, up to 3 million lost their lives (source). As this isn’t the most neutral observer, real numbers are probably much higher. (See an older post here about not trusting governments with the job of human rights measurement). Still today, the country is in such a state that it won’t take much for famine to return.

It was Kim Il Sung who used to say, “Communism is rice,” meaning the system would succeed by giving the people enough to eat. The famine was caused by mismanagement and the inability to adapt to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic transformation of China.

All that said, Kim Jong Il acted with callous disregard to the suffering of his people. Rather than lose face, the North Koreans denied the food crisis for years and then kept humanitarian aid out of the places it was most needed. The regime executed people who tried to adapt by engaging in private business.

By the way, Kim Jong Il is famous for being one of the biggest foodies in Asia. Throughout the nineteen-eighties and well into the famine, he flew couriers around the world to procure delicacies for his own palate — fresh fish from Tokyo for his sushi, cheese from France, caviar from Uzbekistan and Iran, mangoes and papaya from Thailand. (source, source)

There’s always something absurd about famines in a world where there’s plenty of food, too much even in some areas. But this one was particularly surreal. More on North Korea. More on famine. More absurd human rights violations.

Human Rights Maps (72): “Don’t Play With Your Food!”

“Don’t play with your food!”, an apple globe

(source, source)

More on famine. More on the right to food. More human rights maps.

The Causes of Poverty (27): The Effect of the Recession on Global Hunger

I’ve discussed the effects of the current recession on human rights several times before on this blog. Regarding the right to food (art. 25 of the Universal Declaration), it’s obvious that the economic crisis is having a big impact on those already struggling to feed themselves.

The number of chronically hungry people in the world will rise from 913m in 2008 to 1.02 billion this year, a sixth of the global population, says the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation in its annual report on food insecurity. Food prices that are 17% higher than they were two years ago, and big falls in remittances and investment are contributing to growing hunger. The economic slump has meant a growing share of the world’s population is going hungry, after a steady decline since 1970. And the FAO notes that global food output will have to increase by 70% to feed a population projected at 9.1 billion in 2050. (source)

More on hunger and famine.

Human Rights Ads (29): Calorie Intake

(source, a Make Poverty History ad)

More on calorie intake levels, hunger, and famine. More on the Millennium Development Goals here. More human rights ads.

The Environment and Human Rights (3): Water and Human Rights

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Following up from this post, some more information on the water crisis in the world and its implications for human rights. We obviously need water to survive, and no human rights without survival. Inadequate water supplies also cause diseases, violating our right to health. We need water – and clean water - to drink, but also to eat. Or rather, to produce our food. And we need a lot. People drink on average just a few liters a day, but they consume thousands of liters a day if we count the water required to produce their food. And evidently we should count it. Many areas of the world face already now face water shortages (there’s a map here). A fifth of the world’s population already lives in areas short of water. A global water crisis waits around the corner, and one likely consequence is famine, another human rights violation.

If we want to do something about the water crisis, we should be aware of the effect of food production on water shortages. Especially the production of meat requires huge amounts of water, compared to the production of grains or even rice. People in the West eat a lot a meat, and therefore contribute substantially to water shortages. As incomes in the developing world increase, people there will consume more meat. Hence, global water consumption will also increase. Combine this future increase with the fact that there are already shortages and that these shortages will get worse with global warming, desertification etc., and you get a real crisis.

What are the solutions? Or how can we prevent things from getting worse?

• Jokingly we could ask people to become vegetarians. That would also be better for greenhouse gas emissions, by the way.
• More seriously, and more realistically: food production, and especially agriculture and farming, represent 70% of global water consumption. That number could be cut down significantly with better irrigation; “more crop per drop”. There’s incredible waste going on there. 70% of irrigation water is lost in the process. One reason: farmers rarely pay their water bills at market prices, hence no incentives to cut waste. Unfortunately, pricing water at market prices would drive up food prices, pushing many consumers into poverty. And many poor farmers already can’t pay for expensive irrigation systems. More expensive water surely wouldn’t help them. Moreover, market prices may mean the privatization of water, and that’s dangerous. You might as well privatize oxygen.
• Other solutions: cut waste in households and industries. Here, everyone can help. Also more recycling efforts are needed. Desalination, although expensive, is an option. As are better water storage facilities, especially for poor families in developing countries. All these efforts will not only reduce the risk of a major global water crisis, but will also improve crop yields, thereby reducing the price of food and hence the risk of poverty and famine.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (21): Biafra Famine

Picture by Don McCullin of young victims of the Biafra famine in the 1960s. More on the causes of famines here, here, and here. More pictures of famines are here, here, here, here, here, here and here. A warning about “disaster pornography” is here. Other posts in this “iconic images” series are here.

Human Rights Nonsense (3): Disaster Pornography From Somalia

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From Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal:

Anyone who has watched a Western film crew in an African famine will know just how much effort it takes to compose the “right” image. Photogenic starving children are hard to find, even in Somalia.

Somali doctors and nurses have expressed shock at the conduct of film crews in hospitals. They rush through crowded corridors, leaping over stretchers, dashing to film the agony before it passes. They hold bedside vigils to record the moment of death. When the Italian actress Sophia Loren visited Somalia, the paparazzi trampled on children as they scrambled to film her feeding a little girl – three times. This is disaster pornography.

Human Rights Facts (40): The Recession and Global Poverty, Ctd.

A photograph taken during the famine of 1876-1878 in Tamil Nadu, south India during which an estimated 3.5 to 4 million people died, representing possibly as much as one eighth of the rural population. A starving farmer with his young child look at the dying animal in front of them which the original photographic caption describes as "the last of the herd". © Royal Geographical Society, photographer: W.W. Hooper

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Some more information on the impact of the current recession on global poverty (picking up where this previous post left off). By the way, if you want to know why I believe this is a human rights issue, look here.

From The Economist:

New research by the United Nations’ standing committee on nutrition gives a first estimate of how the crisis has hurt the group of people most affected by the crash: the very poorest.

In 1990-2007, the number of hungry people rose by about 80m, though this was, by and large, a period of rising incomes in developing countries (and a huge increase in population). In 2008 alone, the number rose a further 40m, to 963m – half as much in one year as during the previous 17. In other words, lots more children and pregnant women are not getting the food they need. The report reckons that the number of underweight children will rise from 121m to 125m by 2010, assuming no change in the size of the world economy (in fact, it is expected to shrink 2% this year). The World Bank has already estimated that until 2015 the crisis will lead to between 200,000 and 400,000 more children dying every year.

The poorest face two crises: the world recession and the resumption of food-price rises. Food prices had been falling but even then, the global price fall did not translate into a comparable decline on local markets in most poor countries, so the poor did not benefit much. World prices bottomed out in December 2008 and have since risen 26%. In the poorest countries, a rise of 50% in the price of staples pushes up the family food budget from 50% to 60% of household income.

Some More Population Growth Nonsense From India

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After all this, we now have the pleasure to receive the following statement:

If there is electricity in every village, then people will watch TV till late at night and then fall asleep. They won’t get a chance to produce children. When there is no electricity there is nothing else to do but produce babies. Don’t think that I am saying this in a lighter vein. I am serious. TV will have a great impact. It’s a great medium to tackle the problem … 80 per cent of population growth can be reduced through TV. Ghulam Nabi Azad, India’s Health and Family Welfare Minister. (source, via)

India – together with China – is the constant nightmare of population hysterics. India’s population has indeed trebled since independence in 1947 to about 1.2 billion, the result of an agricultural revolution which helped to end famine and extended life expectancy. Strange that a country which has seen simultaneous growth in population and welfare (see here for some poverty numbers) should be so worried about the incompatibility between the two.

The number cited by the Minister – 80% reduction of population growth – also falls under the header “non-evidence based statistics”. I guess as long as you cite a number – whatever number – you’ll be more persuasive. See here for more fun with statistics.

More on India.

Overpopulation, A Collection of Images

I personally don’t believe overpopulation is an important issue, let alone a human rights problem (at least not on the global level; in isolated, mainly agricultural areas characterized by subsistence farming things may be different). But I know that many people think that so-called overpopulation – or, even better, the “global population bomb” – is the world’s most pressing problem and the cause of a large number of rights violations such as famine, hunger, war, violence, poverty etc. I’ve written about it many times before, so I thought the topic would not be out of place in my ”collection of images” series (and it’s also such a rewarding topic for imagery). So here we go.

Overcrowded trains prepare to leave for the city after the final prayer ceremony of Bishwa Ijtema in Tongi, on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, on January 15, 2012. Thousands of Muslims joined the Akheri Munajat, the final supplication as the first phase of the Muslims congregation concluded by seeking forgiveness and blessings for mankind on Sunday, according to local media. (Reuters/Andrew Biraj)

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crowded train in India

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thousands of swimmers crowded into a pool in Penglai in Sichuan, western China

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M.C. Escher, Ascending

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Human Rights Poem (67): Warsaw

Robert W. Service

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Warsaw, Robert Service

I was in Warsaw when the first bomb fell;
I was in Warsaw when the Terror came -
Havoc and horror, famine, fear and flame,
Blasting from loveliness a living hell.
Barring the station towered a sentinel;
Trainward I battled, blind escape my aim.
ENGLAND! I cried. He kindled at the name:
With lion-leap he haled me… All was well.

ENGLAND! they cried for aid, and cried in vain.
Vain was their valour, emptily they cried.
Bleeding, they saw their Cry crucified…
O splendid soldier, by the last lone train,
To-day would you flame forth to fray me place?
Or – would you curse and spit into my face?

September, 1939

More poems about war here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Human Rights and International Law (14): Human Rights vs. Humanitarianism?

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In this post, I want to look at some of the differences – and perhaps conflicts – between human rights activism and humanitarian action (or humanitarian intervention). Obviously, some definitions to start with. There’ve been enough discussions on the definition of human rights on this blog, so I’ll focus now on humanitarianism. (Note: I’m leaving aside the more problematic issue of armed humanitarianism).

Definition of humanitarianism

According to Wikipedia,

humanitarianism is an ethic of kindness, benevolence and sympathy extended universally and impartially to all human beings. No distinction is to be made in the face of human suffering or abuse on grounds of tribal, caste, religious or national divisions.

However, the concept of humanitarianism has become more precise and restrictive over the last decades. In fact, it is now generally understood to be shorthand for “international humanitarian action“, which in turn means international emergency action to alleviate widespread human suffering resulting from war, civil war, famine, drought, natural disasters and other humanitarian crises representing

a critical threat to the health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community or other large group of people, usually over a wide area. (source)

When you think about humanitarianism, you think about the Red Cross, the UNHCR, MSF, WFP etc. The focus is on the alleviation of widespread suffering and the saving of lives.

Hence, there is a close link between humanitarianism and human rights activism. Humanitarianism deals with rights violations. The absence of suffering is a human right, as is life. Of course, human rights are about much more than that. (Free speech, democracy, religious liberty etc. are not about suffering or death, at least not normally). Nevertheless, humanitarianism shares its goals and ideals with part of the human rights agenda, and can therefore be understood as a subset of human rights activism.

Differences between humanitarianism and human rights activism

This link doesn’t mean that there are no differences between the two approaches. I’ll try to mention a few of them here. Apart from the more narrow scope of humanitarianism, compared to human rights activism, the main differences are:

Short term and urgency

Humanitarian agencies such as those mentioned above are by definition engaged in conflict zones or disaster zones. Their only objective is the protection of civilians against immediate harm resulting from war, famine etc. Hence, they are focused on the very short term future: making sure people survive, have enough to eat and are physically secure. Human rights activism, on the contrary, will also look at longer term results and less urgent needs, such as education, institutionalized (as opposed to emergency) healthcare, poverty etc.

Forward looking

Humanitarianism is mainly forward looking, whereas human rights activism reserves a lot of its attention to the past, and more specifically to justice for past human rights violations (including criminal justice).

Immediate causes

Humanitarianism also looks at the immediate causes of suffering, e.g. a war, a disaster etc., whereas human rights activism will tend to identify the root causes behind these immediate causes, e.g. bad governance, poverty, discrimination and other “structural injustices” which surpass the timeframe and the tools of the humanitarian.

Unconditional

Humanitarianism means unconditional action. Given the urgency of the suffering they want to alleviate, agencies will go in, no matter what. The war can still be going on, the disaster can be unfolding… The human rights activist, however, will often point to prerequisites which have to be present before some specific human right can be realized, and without which action is futile (e.g. the removal of a dictator as a prerequisite for freedom of the press). A related point: humanitarianism takes a few human rights in isolation, and works on those only. A human rights activist will look at the whole system of human rights, and stress the interdependence of all human rights.

Political neutrality

Humanitarianism tries to be neutral. It doesn’t take sides in a conflict or in a (civil) war. All suffering is viewed as equally deserving of alleviation, whether it is the suffering of the victim or the suffering of the aggressor (“a universal duty to act in the face of human suffering”). This isn’t moral relativism, but a practical necessity in many cases. If the humanitarian agencies want to have access to the people who are suffering, they often don’t have the luxury of criticizing any of the parties in the conflict, of outspoken public advocacy, and of “naming and shaming”.

The human rights activist, on the contrary, has to take a stand. Human rights aren’t politically neutral. They require, to a certain extent, democratic government, and non-democratic government is often a root cause of many rights violations. (See here as well).

Migration and Human Rights (17): Immigration is Caused by Oppression and Dictatorship

John Rawls

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There are numerous causes of immigration. I mention several and suggest that they would disappear in the Society of liberal and decent Peoples. One is the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, the denial of their human rights. Another is political oppression … Often people are simply fleeing from starvation … Yet famines are often themselves in large part caused by political failures and the absence of decent government. The last cause I mention is population pressure in the home territory, and among its complex of causes is the inequality and subjection of women. Once that inequality and subjection are overcome, and women are granted equal political participation with men and assured education, these problems can be resolved … The problem of immigration is not, then, simply left aside, but is eliminated as a serious problem in a realistic utopia. John Rawls (source, source)

Of course, Rawls doesn’t mean to say that immigration will cease once all countries respect human rights and are governed more or less democratically. There will always be migration. Our globalized economy seems to require it. But migration will be a rational choice for the benefit of all parties. It will be neither a life and death necessity for those who move, nor a major or minor inconvenience for those who receive migrants.

More on migration here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (6): Starving Boy in Uganda

(source, World Press Photo of the Year 1980 by Mike Wells)

More on famine. Suggest a new image in this series.

Human Rights Ads (9): Famine

(source, an Amnesty International ad)

“It’s not happening here, but it is happening now”. More on famine.

The Causes of Poverty (18): Amartya Sen, Famines, and Democracy

Amartya Sen

(source, photo by Mary Lee/Harvard News Office)

Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence … they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press. … a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have. Amartya Sen

victims of a famine in India

Amartya Sen argues that democracy (which is a subset of human rights) is the best way to avoid famines. Of course, a well-functioning democracy is not a sufficient condition for the absence of famines. Other mechanisms also contribute to famine prevention, so it’s not impossible to see famines in democracies.

What is a famine?

G. B. Masefield states:

On balance it seems clear that any satisfactory definition of famine must provide that the food shortage is either widespread or extreme, if not both, and that the degree of extremity is best measured by human mortality from starvation. (source)

A famine occurs when there is a sudden collapse of the level of food availability and consumption (measured in terms of calorie intake). Sen’s argument is that a focus on lack of availability isn’t enough. Actual consumption is what counts. And consumption can drop when availability doesn’t (this was the case in the Bengal famine of 1943 for instance). Famines occur not only from a lack of food, caused by drought, crop failures or floods, but also from a lack of information. Rumors of a famine, even false rumors, are often enough for people to start hoarding and panic buying, which pushes up the price of goods, and which makes it impossible for poor people to get enough food. As a result, they may starve in the midst of abundance. A war may have the same effect or make it worse. And so can ineffective food distribution mechanisms.

Inequality

An important point about famines is therefore inequality:

While Famines involve fairly widespread acute starvation, there is no reason to think that it will affect all groups in the famine-affected nation. Indeed, it is by no means clear that there has ever occurred a famine in which all groups in a country have suffered from starvation, since different groups typically do have very different commanding powers over food, and an over-all shortage brings out the contrasting powers in stark clarity. Amartya Sen (source)

Information

Free information can counter these risks. It can debunk myths and rumors about food availability. It can inform accountable governments of certain risks and force them to act in order to remedy the food distribution, to impose price controls etc.

Price controls, however, are a risky business. Higher food prices may lead to a larger volume of food production because food producers will be encouraged to produce. Hence, higher prices may increase the overall availability of food and reduce the risk of famine. However, as we have seen, availability is not enough to stop famines. Distribution and equality of availability is just as important, and higher prices may result in very unequal availability and may put poor people at risk. But then, again, these poor people may find a better paying job in food production if food prices are higher… This is all very complicated indeed. For some light on the matter, look here.

More on famine here.

Political Artist (18): Banksy

Feed the World

Banksy

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Human Rights Facts (17): What Dictatorship Does to You, A Comparison of North and South Korea

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Needless to say that North Korea and South Korea, since the division of the country in 1948, took very different roads. If we take a look at the two countries now, and see how differently they developed since 1948 – when they started off at roughly the same level – we can see what dictatorship does to a country.

The differences are startling, even if we put aside the horrible famine of 1995-1998 which killed 1 million people, or 4% of the population. (Almost uniquely in history, this famine was as much an urban as a rural famine. Still today, many farmers are forced to eat grass. Even more than usual, this famine was a “government sponsored famine”).

• GDP per person is more than 17 times higher in the North
• International trade is 140 times higher
• Power generation is 16 times higher, whereas the population is only a bit more than double (see satellite image below)
• Life expectancy is more than 10 years higher
• etc.

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Here’s a satellite map showing North and South Korea’s Electricity usage in the evening:

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Another, better version:

North and South Korea satellite image

Some more data on North Korea:

(source unknown)

Cultural Rights (11): Genocide

(photo showing the excavation of mass graves in Srebrenica)

What is genocide?

Genocide is the deliberate, systematic and violent destruction of a group (an ethnic, racial, religious, national or political group). This destruction can take many forms:

• the outright murder of (the majority of) the members of the group
• inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about destruction
• measures intended to prevent births
• systematic rape as a means of terror and a means to “dilute” the identity of the group
• forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
• destroying the (cultural) identity of the group (forceful assimilation; imposition of a language, religion etc.)

“Systematic” is important here. Short-term outburst or pogrom type actions will probably not amount to genocide.

The “intent to destroy” is also crucial when labeling actions or campaigns as genocidal. The destruction, however, doesn’t have to be physical (i.e. large-scale murder). As is obvious from the list above, cultural destruction or destruction of the groups’ separate identity is also genocide.

Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that genocide is

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group…”

The “in part” bit has led to some confusion. When is the part of the group that is being destroyed big enough to warrant the label of genocide? There is still some discussion about absolute numbers of victims, percentages of the total population of the group, degree of killing in the territory controlled by the killers etc.

Of all the generally recognized genocides that have taken place throughout human history, the most infamous ones occured in the 20th century (the Holocaust, Rwanda, Armenia, Cambodia, Stalin’s forced famines, Mao’s Great Leap Forward etc.).

Stages of genocide

Before a genocide is actually carried out, the perpetrators usually take a number of “preparatory” steps:

• dehumanization of a group (vermin, insects or diseases…)
• promotion of narratives of “us and them“
• hate propaganda, polarization
• criminalization of a group (group has to be eliminated “in order that we may live”; them or us)
• identification of victims (“yellow star”)
• concentration of victims (ghettos)
• mobilization of large numbers of perpetrators
• state support and logistical organization (arms, transport, training of militias etc.)

Causes of genocide

The causes of genocide are often hard to pin down. They include:

• long-lasting tensions
• imbalances in political power
• imbalances in wealth or economic power
• scarcity
• religious incompatibilities
• indoctrination and propaganda
• civil war
• ideals of cultural purity and autonomy
• ethnological constructs (e.g. the creation of “hutuness” in Rwanda) which get a life of their own
• colonial heritage
• outside indifference
• etc.

Intervention to stop genocide

Here’s a post on humanitarian intervention, and here’s another. Most people around the world agree that the international community should intervene to stop a genocide:

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Human Rights Quote (46): Infant Mortality

picture by Kevin Carter, winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize

“The child mortality rate—the number of under-fives dying per thousand live births—dropped by almost a quarter worldwide between 1990 and 2006. … Progress in sub-Saharan Africa, where the death rate is highest, has been slower. Around one in six children in the region still die before the age of five and the rate is rising in some countries. Pneumonia, diarrhoeal diseases and malaria together account for more than two-fifths of child deaths.” From The Economist

More on infant mortality.

Human Rights Facts (13): Millennium Development Goals

I’ve mentioned the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) before. This post gives some more data.

The United Nations agreed the 8 MDGs in 2000, to be reached in 2015. Now, half-way to that deadline, there is progress, but not all regions in the world are doing equally well. However, even in the poorest region – sub-Saharan Africa – some progress has been made.

GOAL 1: ERADICATE EXTREME POVERTY

One of the targets in this goal is to halve the number of people living on less than $1 a day:

There has been substantial progress on this target. Another, related target under this first goal is to halve the number of people suffering from hunger:

On the sub-target of the number of children who are underweight, there has been progress but much more can be done.

See also these posts on the topic of poverty and famine.

GOAL 2: ACHIEVE UNIVERSAL PRIMARY EDUCATION

Target: By 2015, all children to be able to complete a course of primary schooling:

Good progress here, but these data on enrollment do not say anything about the quality of education or the regularity of attendance.

See also this post on literacy and this one on child labor.

GOAL 3: PROMOTE GENDER EQUALITY AND EMPOWER WOMEN

This goal is more vague and less easily measured. One target is the elimination of gender disparity in primary and secondary education no later than 2015. One way to measure this target is to count how many women have secure and paid employment in areas other than agriculture:

See also this post on gender discrimination.

GOAL 4: REDUCE CHILD MORTALITY

Target: Between 1990 and 2015, reduce the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds:

Some progress again, but there are still more than 10 million children who die annually before their fifth birthday, mostly from preventable causes. And a long way away from the target.

See also this post on infant mortality.

GOAL 5: IMPROVE MATERNAL HEALTH

Target: Reduce the maternal mortality rate by three-quarters between 1990 and 2015. Maternal mortality rates remain unacceptably high across the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, a woman’s risk of dying from complications during childbirth is 1 in 16, compared with 1 in 3,800 in the developed world. More than half a million women die during pregnancy or childbirth every year, and many millions suffer from inadequately treated complications.

See also this post on maternal mortality.

GOAL 6: COMBAT HIV/AIDS, MALARIA AND OTHER DISEASES

Target: Have halted and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/Aids:

The number of infections seems to be leveling off, but the number of people dying from aids isn’t.

See also this post on aids.

GOAL 7: ENSURE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

Also difficult to measure. One of the targets is to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without access to drinking water and basic sanitation:

GOAL 8: DEVELOP A GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP FOR DEVELOPMENT

The total amount of international development aid is now more than $100 billion a year.

This is the progress that has been made:

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See also this post on development aid.

Related Articles

• Factbox: Progress in the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (reuters.com)
• “UN Millennium Development Goals Summit Tackles PHE” and related posts (newsecuritybeat.blogspot.com)
• The millennium development goals need progressive UK leadership | Juanita During (guardian.co.uk)
• Millennium Development Goals summit opens at UN (cbc.ca)
• Meeting the Millennium Development Goals – can we do it? (leftfootforward.org)
• John W. McArthur: Our Pledges for the Millennium Development Goals (huffingtonpost.com)
• Top 5 Millennium Development Goal success stories (csmonitor.com)

Migration and Human Rights (3): Refugees

Angelina Jolie

In countries where people have to flee their homes because of persecution and violence, political solutions must be found, peace and tolerance restored, so that refugees can return home. In my experience, going home is the deepest wish of most refugees. Angelina Jolie

In a previous post, I talked a bit on the problem of migration and how it’s linked to human rights. I also tried to give a classification of types of migrants. One type is the refugee, and according to the classification the refugee is an involuntary migrant and a “push-migrant”. It’s the situation in the home country – usually war, famine or persecution or a combination – which forces or pushes him or her to migrate abroad, usually to one of the neighboring countries. The refugee is different from other types of migrants, such as the people who feel the “pull” of economic opportunity which, voluntarily or involuntarily (in the case of extreme poverty), drives them abroad.

Refugees who flee war, famine or oppression but do not leaev their home country are called internally displaced persons.

Numbers

According to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (HCR), there were roughly 20 million refugees in the world in 2005, and 33 million in 2006. This is an underestimate because the numbers don’t include the Palestinians refugees, many of the Afghan refugees etc. Amnesty International place the number of worldwide refugees last year at just over 36 million. Three quarter of these come from Asia and Africa. The top refugee producing countries are:

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The country with the largest number of internally displaced persons is Sudan, with over 5 million. Pakistan is the top host country in the world for refugees:

And these are 2007 data, with an interesting breakdown between international refugees and internally displaced persons:

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Countries’ responses

Countries have an obligation to accept refugee on their territory. Article 14 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights states that

1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. 2. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

However, this obligation is often rejected by countries. Countries often subject

“refugees to arbitrary arrest, detention, denial of social and economic rights and closed borders. In the worst cases, the most fundamental principle of refugee protection, non-refoulement, is violated, and refugees are forcibly returned to countries where they face persecution.” Human Rights Watch (http://hrw.org/doc/?t=refugees&document_limit=0,2)

The states that create the refugee problem also have obligations. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights states that

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Therefore, countries have an obligation to create or restore the circumstances which make it possible for people to return home. It’s up to these countries, with the assistance of the international community, to address the root causes that force people to flee.

The Causes of Poverty (5): Overpopulation

A few cartoons about overpopulation. I’ll try to show in this post how this is related to human rights.

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Some blame overpopulation for many of the world’s problems such as poverty, famine and war (which are obviously rights violations). There are supposed to be too many people for peaceful coexistence and sustainable food production. The areas of the world which are inhabitable and useable for agriculture are too small compared to the number of people living in them. These people are followers of Thomas Malthus or of malthusianism, and often even predict major catastrophes which will reduce the population significantly. They also advocate some quite draconian measures for limiting the human population.

Thomas Malthus

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In scientific terms: overpopulation occurs when an organism’s numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat; carrying capacity = [available sustainable resources > current and projected needs of the organism].

For example, imagine a population of 10 living in a habitat of 10 square kilometers. These 10 square kilometers can produce food, drinking water, shelter etc. for 15. Then there is no overpopulation. But if the population grows or is expected to grow at a rate of 10% annually, without an equal or superior growth in resources, then overpopulation threatens. There would also be overpopulation if the material resources are adequate but other needs such as space, privacy etc. are not met. For example if the available space is too small to guarantee peaceful co-existence.

So overpopulation can result from changes in the population (increased births, reduced deaths, better healthcare, migration etc.) or from changes in the resources – material or psychological – in the habitat (for example desertification, natural disasters, technological innovations etc.), or from a combination of both.

The current state of the world’s population is the following:

• Present world population – 6,500,000,000 but unequal distribution of world population (see graphs below). The main population clusters are East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Europe.
• Average world growth rate – 1.4% annual, but also unequal distribution of growth rates: fastest growing areas are the Middle East – over 4.0% annual – and the slowest growing areas are Central and Eastern Europe – 0% or less. Southern Africa even sees negative growth rates as a result of the HIV epidemic.
• Forecasts are notoriously difficult but the world’s population is expected to rise by 40% to 9.1 billion by 2050.

Blaming everything on overpopulation is misguided and reductionist. Problems such as poverty and war have a complex set of causes, including in some but not all cases overpopulation, government policies, cultural factors, repercussions from colonialism, religion etc.

One can also question whether there is indeed a problem of overpopulation. Per capita food production has risen the last 50 years, and poverty (expressed as the number of people living on less than 1$ a day) has decreased while the population has increased. So poverty and war may not have anything to do with the size of the world’s population. However, ecological problems may have something to do with it. If so, the solution would surely not be population control, which is much too difficult and often dictatorial. Changes in consumption patterns are a much more promising route.

Economic Human Rights (10): Famine

famine in Sudan

Here are some of the worst famines in the 20th century. In China between 1958 and 1962, an estimated 10 to 30 million people died as a result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. The government was unaware of the problems and continued to export food and cut imports several years into the famine. Farmers were collectivised into communes of about 25,000 people and had to give the state a large percentage of their crops. Officials often exaggerated the size of harvests, and in many places the entire grain harvest was seized.

In the Soviet Union in 1921-22, 9 million people died because of massive crop failures due to drought. Lenin did not respond until it was too late. Again, in Ukraine in 1932-34, 8 million people died as a result of Stalin’s industrialization programme in which the government seized grain for exports. It needed the hard currency to buy industrial equipment. Stalin refused to them food aid.

Famine is often the result of:

• Climate conditions such as drought or other natural disasters such as flooding. Also soil degradation, desertification etc.
• Underdevelopment. Famine often occurs in countries with subsistence agriculture, that is, where most farming is aimed at producing just enough food energy to survive.
• Imbalance of population and food supply (over-population, sometimes as a consequence of refugee flows, in themselves the consequence of war, civil unrest, or famine elsewhere).
• War or civil unrest.
• Inadequate logistics for food distribution.
• Misguided or plain evil government policy. This is obvious from the examples above. The Great Irish Famine, 1845-1849, occurred as food was being shipped from Ireland to England because the English could afford to pay higher prices. The same thing happend during the 1973 famine in Ethiopia when food was shipped to other regions in Ethiopia because the people there could pay more. Famine is sometimes used as a tool of repressive governments as a means to eliminate opponents, as was the case in the Ukranian famine.
• Lack of democratic governance, resulting in lack of information flows and accountability. Amartya Sen stated that shortfalls in food supply do not cause widespread deaths in a democracy because vote-seeking politicians will undertake relief efforts and will be aware of the problems thanks to the freedom in their countries.
• A combination of the elements above.

It is often stated that climate change will result in more famines in the future, as a result of desertification, flooding, hurricanes etc.

More on famine.

The Causes of Poverty (4): Governance

Amartya Sen

No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. Amartya Sen

If there are no free flows of information, no accountable government that needs to justify its actions in order to be re-elected, and no free press, then you are likely to have more corruption, more embezzlement of public funds and more people who acquire an unfair advantage from the proceeds of natural resources and other sources of prosperity. The rule of law and the openness of government, which are typical of democracy, limit not only corruption but also the ineffective management or outright squandering of natural or other resources by untouchable governments.

Furthermore, there is a link between corruption and squandering. Corrupt governments will be more inclined to set up grandiose but foolish and wasteful mega-projects, because this gives them more opportunities for corruption. Corruption is also a tax on investment, which is why it hampers investment and economic growth. Especially the often all-important foreign investments (the import of technology and knowledge) diminish as corruption increases.

Some data on famine.

Economic Human Rights (6): Health

 

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Bad health and suffering create the same problems as poverty. You have to be healthy and without pain, in order to have a cultural and political life and to be able to use freedom rights and political rights. A sick, suffering or toiling person is thrown back upon himself and unable to relate to the outside world, just as a person who concentrates exclusively on his or her body for pleasurable reasons.

Intense bodily sensations of any kind – positive and negative – shut us off from the world, because they make it impossible to perceive anything except our own body. In other words, they make our public and political life and the use of our classical rights impossible or undesirable.

Hunger and consumption, as well, force you to concentrate on yourself and your body. You do not have the time, the energy or the desire to concentrate on the world. When you are eating or thinking of eating, you are imprisoned in cyclical biological necessities and in your metabolism with nature necessary for the preservation of life. You have to avoid sickness, pain and hunger – as well as their extreme opposites – to be open to the world and fit for cultural and political life.

More on health.

Human Rights Quote (15): Human Rights and Democracy

Kofi Annan

Even if he can vote to choose his rulers, a young man with AIDS who cannot read or write and lives on the brink of starvation is not truly free. Equally, even if she earns enough to live, a woman who lives in the shadow of daily violence and has no say in how her country is run is not truly free. Kofi Annan

Human rights and democracy are interdependent and are both requisites for true freedom. How can you democracy without food or decent education and healthcare? Or without freedom of information and association? And what’s the use of freedom of opinion if your political opinion is not taken into account during fair and free elections? And this can go on for many paragraphs.

Which does not mean that the one without the other – democracy without full respect for rights, or rights without a perfect democracy – are completely useless or impossible. The goal however should be mutual reinforcement. And this happens to a degree automatically. Where you have rights, you will see democracy developing. And where you have democracy, you will see growing respect for rights.

More on the link between democracy and human rights.