300,000 a Day

The interconnectivity of events, natural forces and the survivability of large segments of humanity are both fascinating and horrifying. For example, when climate change rendered vast portions of eastern Syria and southwestern Iraq perpetually drought-ridden and no longer able to support the agriculture that had defined that countryside for centuries, well over a million farmers, mostly Sunnis, were displaced. Farms turned fallow. Families lost their livelihoods, now forced to leave their homes. 

Pleas to the Alawite (Shiite) Assad regime in Damascus and to the Shiite-led (Nouri al-Maliki) government in Baghdad fell on deaf ears. Shiites were not about to aid Sunnis. That’s when al Qaeda and ISIS, Sunnis extremists, stepped into that void. You know the rest, from migrating farmers rejected by many of the lands they sought, to horrific conflict with vicious terrorists leading the fray. Brutal counterattacks from Shiites to just about any Sunni configuration marred a horrible situation into unfathomable.

Regional conflicts roiled the earth. Rohingya Muslims being systematically slaughtered in Myanmar. Boko Haram kidnappings and murders in Nigeria. Civil War, literally a surrogate war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, tore apart Yemen. Hamas and Israel constantly exchange mortal blows. Conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia decimated entire communities, destroyed farms and escalated both homelessness and starvation. As if that were not enough, enter the pandemic, often in nations too poor to contemplate mass vaccinations at any level. The horrors just continue unabated.

The United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. What all of the above have in common is starvation. That’s what the WFP was designed to counter. People who are seriously ill, in the middle of a combat zone with bombs and bullets flying or no longer able to work fallow land face starvation. And when the nations that used to support massive contributions of food and medical support are now deeply financially impaired with their own internal struggles with COVID-19, the net impact is simply that more people, particularly children, will starve to death. And while the United States is watching its economy being decimated by this disease, mass starvation is not our reality. Yet the WFP is facing new levels of mass starvation they have not witnessed in recent memory.

The head of the WFP, David Beasley, has told world leaders that without billions of dollars of additional funding, “we are going to have famines of biblical proportions in 2021.” “Now, Beasley said, COVID-19 is surging again, economies are continuing to deteriorate particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and there is another wave of lockdowns and shutdowns.

“But he said the money that was available in 2020 isn’t going to be available in 2021, so he has been using the Nobel to meet leaders virtually and in person, talk to parliaments, and give speeches to sensitize those with power to ‘this tragedy that we are facing -- crises that really are going to be extraordinary over the next, who knows, 12 to 18 months.’

“‘Everybody now wants to meet with the Nobel Peace Prize winner,’ he said, explaining he now gets 45 minutes instead of 15 minutes with leaders and is able to go into depth and explain how bad things are going to be next year and how leaders are going to have to prioritize programs, Beasley said. ‘And the response has really been good...I’m telling them you’re not going to have enough money to fund all the projects you historically fund,’ he said.” EuroNews.com, November 14th. But what is really at stake? 

Back in April, before the prize was announced, Beasley warned: “that in addition to the threat posed by COVID-19, the world faces ‘multiple famines of biblical proportions’ that could result in 300,000 deaths per day — a ‘hunger pandemic.’ COVID-19 will almost double people in acute hunger by end of 2020… New WFP figures indicate additional 129 million lives and livelihoods will be at risk…

“Speaking at an online briefing broadcast by the UN on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, Beasley highlighted the fact that there are currently 821 million food-insecure people in the world. ‘If we don't prepare and act now, to secure access, avoid funding shortfalls and disruptions to trade,’ he said, the result could be a ‘humanitarian catastrophe … in a short few months.’… Beasley added: ‘Millions of civilians living in conflict-scarred nations, including many women and children, face being pushed to the brink of starvation, with the spectre of famine a very real and dangerous possibility.’” WFP.org, April 20th. 

Just what the world needs is hundreds of millions of people with little or nothing to lose. Instability provokes further unwanted mass migration and armed conflict. Human life dwindles in value. Children are left without life-sustaining support. Death rules. While the United States cannot fix these shortfalls remotely on its own, and while private charitable contributions, however magnificent they may be, cannot fill the void, perhaps a planet just might unite even a little bit more to address this cruelty that surrounds us.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am thinking about the billions of dollars that we waste on fomenting political polarization that could be deployed actually to do some good on this earth.