[R-G] Nairn: Burma, Food Crisis, Wall Street, and the World Economy

[Anthony Fenton]

Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry
Burma, Food Crisis, Wall Street, and the World Economy

June 06, 2008 By Allan Nairn
Source: News and Comment

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17853

In parts of Burma before the cyclone hit the heat was so severe that  
you could walk around on a hazy day and run the risk of sunstroke.

On Thingyan the Buddhist holiday in which people dunk each other with  
water you could get a full-face full-pail drenching and be crisply  
sundried in minutes.

But when the storm water rose on the Irrawaddy Delta drying out became  
secondary because the sun's rays were largely gone and so was much of  
the land, housing, and plantings.

No one really knows how many people died but the world press has made  
the point that it would have been far fewer if Burma had a better  
government.

The point could also be made, though, that far fewer still would have  
died if the world had a better system of producing and allocating its  
wealth.

It's hard to come up with solid figures but it seems safe to estimate  
that the entire disposable wealth of the Irrawaddy Delta before the  
storm, that of its' 3.5 million residents, could have been less than  
that of one table-full of diners at New York's Four Seasons Grill Room.

Actually, it's more dramatic than that.

Working with figures from Forbes magazine, the IMF, and the UNDP, it's  
possible to estimate that there are between three hundred and a  
thousand individuals whose accumulated wealth is so vast that any one  
of them alone could pay each person in the Irrawaddy Delta for a year,  
and in the case of the richest, like Warren Buffett, could do it for  
six decades running and still have billions left.

One could get a visualization of this notion and its implications when  
flying over the Netherlands. Looking down from the Royal Dutch Airline  
a few weeks after Irrawaddy sank, you could see another delta, a  
country with much land below sea level, but where long infusions of  
wealth -- much of it extracted from Southeast Asia by whip (see the  
histories of the Dutch East and West Indies Companies) -- have made  
possible the building, behind strong dikes, by the sea, of nice,  
glassy homes and offices.

A cyclone Nargis would have killed anywhere -- viz. the recent storms  
in the US midwest -- but whether you survive a storm depends in  
important part on whether you and your ancestors were rich or poor and  
were able to build good infrastructure (even in the US, see New  
Orleans).

So the rich world is right to flagellate the Burmese generals for  
holding back resources as people die (a BBC World TV interviewer  
yesterday called it "criminal neglect") but wrong to fail to note that  
they do the same thing daily, on a global, far more deadly, scale.

The rich do pass out some of their spare wealth during a cyclone or  
other covered crisis, but on a daily basis withhold enough of it such  
that 850 million people routinely go hungry.

The recent food price hike has upped that statistic by perhaps a  
hundred million, and so it is said that we are in a "food crisis" and  
that "the era of cheap food is over."

The world would indeed be in a food crisis if there were not enough  
food to feed the people. But that is not the case.

The problem is that many millions of people can't afford food. That,  
clearly, is not a food crisis, but rather a wealth crisis, more  
precisely a wealth distribution crisis that can be solved by shifts  
from rich to poor, and a crisis that can be kept from recurring if  
laws and economies are then modified to institutionalize a new, more  
realistic, system that doesn't happen to starve people -- an objective  
which, one would think, is a fairly modest, and perhaps popular, goal.

Today in Rome there is a world summit on food and there has been a  
political stir over an attempt to exclude Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's  
liberator and despot.

The point is made correctly that Mugabe runs a failed economic system  
that kills many people who could have been saved if he had made  
different choices.

But the same could also be said of a number of others at the summit --  
those who run the world economy -- which is certainly failed from the  
point of view of those who draw their last breath hungry.

UN people from FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and other  
agencies have also caused a flutter by talking about $50 billion, over  
many years, for various food projects, which is a tenfold increase but  
still less than the personal holdings of Buffett, Bill Gates, and  
Carlos Slim, who got quite rich essentially overnight when Mexico gave  
him its cell phone system. It's also what the US goes though in about  
five months of occupying Iraq, where child malnutrition has risen in  
rough correlation with precision bomb drops and Iraqi democracy.

If someone's dying and you have a dollar that could save them and you  
withhold it, you have killed them. It's so extreme it sounds  
ridiculous, but it happens to be true, and will continue to be true so  
long as surplus coexists with bodies living on the cliff of death, or,  
for the luckier young ones, the cliff of mere body stunting and  
underdevelopment of their brains.

The big story before the food crisis was the US Wall Street financial  
crisis. For some weeks sober economists were fearing 1929-style panic.  
But Ben Bernanke, the US Federal Reserve chairman, stepped in to save  
the day by essentially imagining into existence several hundreds of  
billions of dollars worth of money that was effectively made available  
to some of the world's richest institutions and people.

The coverage focused on the fact that Bernanke did this cleverly, and  
succeeded, but it could also have noted that this is a remarkable  
aspect of today's economy: while most people have to work for their  
money incrementally, bending in mud to plant their rice, a few can  
imagine it into existence in large blocks, and give it to their  
friends and colleagues.

By printing money, issuing bonds, making loans, creating new financial  
instruments, and by other means, these few create notions that have  
the power to buy goats, or anything else one wants, and can continue  
doing so indefinitely so long as rich society buys the pretense.

Which is to say that though, say, getting food to people, requires  
rearranging some physical things, most of the task involves  
rearranging the notions that govern actions from people's heads.

It's simply a choice as to whether the power to conjure funds will be  
used for hungry people, and not just the juridical, imaginary persons  
that are investment corporations (US judicial precedent gives  
corporations the legal rights of persons, but like persons become  
ghosts it's impossible to jail them if they transgress).

And it is likewise simply a choice whether or not to save expiring  
people by allowing resources to be shifted from an aid ship off  
Burma's shore, or from the guys having drinks and lunch at the Four  
Seasons, table four.