From the Salmon

Earlier this morning, I had a post ready to go on the food emergency in West Africa. But then I read an article in the Washington Post that led me to rethink what I wanted to write about. Honestly, I’m still thinking through some things. So while I’d ordinarily wait to write until I had a better grasp of what it was I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, I think this time I’m just going to use this space to get some rough thoughts out there, ask a few questions, and see what y’all think.

We’ve talked before about the complexities of tackling a massive problem like extreme global poverty. If you spend any time at all reading about or discussing this, you will inevitably run into the argument that a lot of international aid is ineffective because it goes to prop up the regimes of corrupt, awful leaders. And while it’s not quite that simple, there’s some truth there. The argument often continues to point out that liberal democracies tend not to suffer famine or to suggest that market reforms might lay the groundwork for positive economic growth. In a very simplistic sense, this is part of the argument behind the recommendations and requirements that the IMF lays out for the poorest of nations.

But here’s the thing.... It makes sense to point to a country like Zimbabwe and say that the impending food emergency can be traced in large part to Mugabe’s misguided land reform and his horrific policies aimed at the urban poor and rural citizenry. But Niger’s case is much different. In many ways, Niger seems to be doing a lot of things right. It is a fairly respectable democracy in a region where dictatorship and military coups are more the norm. It has begun to implement many of the free market reforms recommended by the IMF and the EU.

And yet millions of Niger’s citizens face a dire food emergency.

When I first started reading and writing about this, the storyline seemed pretty clear:
bad harvest + locusts + lack of international response = famine. But the articles I read today suggest that the story is much more complicated than that.

Via ...My Heart’s in Accra, I found an article in the Guardian from earlier this month that puts it this way:

The starvation in Niger is not the inevitable consequence of poverty, or simply the fault of locusts or drought. It is also the result of a belief that the free market can solve the problems of one of the world’s poorest countries.

The price of grain has skyrocketed; a 100kg bag of millet, the staple grain, costs around 8,000 to 12,000 West African francs (around €13) last year but now costs more than 22,000 francs (€25). According to Washington-based analysts the Famine Early Warning System Network (Fewsnet), drought and pests have only had a “modest impact” on grain production in Niger.

The last harvest was only 11% below the five-yearly average. Prices have been rising also because traders in Niger have been exporting grain to wealthier neighbouring countries, including Nigeria and Ghana.

Niger, the second-poorest country in the world, relies heavily on donors such as the EU and France, which favour free-market solutions to African poverty. So the Niger government declined to hand out free food to the starving. Instead, it offered millet at subsidised prices. But the poorest could still not afford to buy.

[...]

The UN, whose World Food Programme distributes emergency supplies in other hunger-stricken parts of Africa, also declined to distribute free food. The reason given was that interfering with the free market could disrupt Niger’s development out of poverty.

The food emergency in Niger doesn’t seem to be a proper reflection of Niger’s ability to produce food. I’ve read a number of accounts of bustling, well-stocked food markets throughout the country.

Ultimately, it’s possible that these market reforms will be the key to getting Niger out of its current cycle of extreme poverty. But if letting the free market drive pricing results in the death of hundreds of thousands to millions of people, is it worth it? Might there be other preconditions that need to be met before freeing prices?

Look, the dark side of capitalism is that there will always be economic losers. But there’s a huge difference between inevitable income inequity and inevitable mass starvation. I don’t want to pretend that there’s anything but an ugly answer to this question, but what is the threshhold where the loss outweighs the benefits of market liberalization?

The Washington Post article I mentioned earlier tells the same story in a different way. I’m not going to quote as much of the article as I want to, so please read the whole thing. In addition to the high prices attributable to free market reforms,

the tradition of sharing in their society is giving way to sharper, more selfish attitudes as Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries, reaches for a more materialistic, Westernized future.

[...]

“There are people who are making profit out of this whole situation,” said Abdoulkader Mamane Idi, a local radio journalist. “The link of brotherhood and solidarity has been broken.”

[...]

In the mostly Muslim nation, where the wealthy have a religious duty to set aside a portion of their income for the poor, some Islamic leaders said fewer and fewer are bothering to do so.

“There is nothing like generosity now,” said Malan Hassane, the imam of a neighborhood mosque. “Selfishness is gaining ground.” He maintained that humanitarian groups would not need to intervene if people here were more willing to feed one another.

Now you can certainly argue that the traditional way of life in Niger hadn’t done much to break the country out of abysmal poverty. I don’t want to overromanticize this point. But there’s still something distressing about the way that market reform tears at the fabric of community, undermines commitment to religious duty, and squelches the spirit of generosity.

I very much hope that someday, Nigeriens and others who live in poverty might know the abundance and the opportunity that I’ve known in the United States. But at the same time, reading this article made me contemplate what we’ve given up in the U.S. in order to let the free market have so much control over our society and over our lives. At what cost have we achieved our “materialistic, Westernized” status?

Have we lost our link of brotherhood and solidarity? In a mostly Christian nation, where the wealthy have a religious duty to give to the poor, how many of us bother to do so? Is selfishness gaining ground? Hell, has selfishness flat out won?

There’s not extreme poverty in the U.S. like what we read about in Niger, but still, consider a statement like the last sentence from that excerpt: “humanitarian groups would not need to intervene if people here were more willing to feed one another.” Considering the preponderant wealth of the U.S., how scathing a criticism is that if we turn it on ourselves?

Jeanne at Body and Soul reads the same article and asks this: “Are we better off with more things and fewer connections? Do we think Africans will be?”

As I said at the outset, I’m still thinking through a lot of this. These are big questions. I know I’m not the first to ask them. But it just seems like there must be a better way. As an American, I cannot be satisfied with this. As I Christian, I really cannot be satisfied with this.

Do you feel the same way?