Robert Buddan
October 16 was World Food Day. Food is a basic human right. Ending hunger is the first of the United Nations Millennium goals. Yet, the number of hungry is growing by five million a year, despite dramatic gains in China and India. Somewhere in the world, a child dies of hunger every five seconds, more than five million children a year. Ninety-five per cent of the undernourished people in the world live in the developing countries. This is equivalent to the combined population of the United States, Canada and the European Union.
Yet, there is enough excess food in the United Kingdom to feed the undernourished people in Ethiopia. The number of people who die of hunger each year is the same as the number who die from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. The single biggest cause of hunger is poverty, not the lack of food on the planet. People just do not have enough money to buy food. But it costs only €0.19 a day to give a child a daily school lunch in a developing country. Millions of children work for a meal instead of going to school.
Affected by climate change
On October 12, Al Gore and scientists of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. People living in poverty are the worst affected by climate change. Billions of these people face shortages of food and water and exposure to greater flooding. Climate change is having a direct impact on animals, food and water. Between 75 million and 220 million people across Africa could face water shortage by 2020. Agriculture, fed by rainfall, could drop by 50 per cent in some African countries by that time. Between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of all animal and plant species face extinction at the present predicted rise in temperatures. Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to migrate as rising sea levels overcome land on all the continents and island states. Migration and the fight for scarce land and food will increase the likelihood of wars and conflicts. Reduced areas for growing crops, changes in the length of the crop season, and reduced yields will increase hunger. Rising sea levels threaten coastal cities, fishing and tourism around the world.
If this sounds alarmist, remember that California is burning right now. Industrialised countries are finally beginning to pay more attention. For the first time, the U.N. Security Council, on which the world's military powers sit, has discussed climate change. Legislators from the richest countries (the Group of Eight) and some of the most populous countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa) have jointly given their commitment to tackling the problem. The world treaty, the Kyoto Agreement, is being improved with governments (except the United States) agreeing that climate change is now beyond doubt. It is sinking in that climate change is a real and present danger to water, ecosystems, food, coasts, industries and health.
Taino civilisation
Caribbean history makes good learning for where the world has gone wrong. Taino (Arawak) civilisation was ecosystemic. It balanced human needs with nature. The word Taino means 'men of the good' and these good people had a civilisation based on the principle of food for all and using nature only for sustaining human life. When Columbus and his men enslaved the Tainos and forced them to search for gold, the Tainos made a counterproposal. They would feed Columbus and his men for the rest of their lives if they allowed them to remain free. Food and freedom were more important than gold and slavery. Columbus himself wrote that they were very healthy looking and showed no sign of hunger or want. Barriero reported, "The Tainos' culture has been designated as 'primitive' by Western scholarship, yet it prescribed a way of life that strove to feed all the people, and a spirituality that respected most of their main animal and food sources, as well as the natural forces like climate, season and weather. The Taino lived respectfully in a bountiful place and so their nature was bountiful. Their life was uniquely adapted to the environment and on the larger islands they sustained millions of people with large-scale agriculture through cooperation and sharing."
Convenient doctrine
There is a myth about human nature - that it is selfish and motivated by competition and profit. This is not science or common sense. It is a convenient doctrine for selfish cultures. Had European philosophers merely looked around them at the way indigenous people lived, they would have known otherwise. Had they come to the Caribbean with the adventurers and preachers, they would have learned something entirely different from the Tainos.
Historians say that a comparison of the lifestyle of the Tainos and today's standard of living in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as the ecological degradation caused by extensive deforestation, indicates that the island and its citizens were better fed, healthier and better governed by the Tainos' so-called primitive methods than the modern populations of that same island.
Surely, there must be a better way to develop than to kill off people through hunger, slavery and war - of which the Tainos knew nothing - and killing off the planet through pollution and deforestation, which the Tainos would find incomprehensible.
If we are to learn from our heritage as we hope each Heritage Week, we should learn about how to feed all the people and preserve our ecology, that is, how to find an ecosystemic way to enjoy modernity.
Professor Anthony Chen of the University of the West Indies' Department of Physics at Mona was a member of the esteemed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that received the Nobel Prize with Al Gore. Professor Chen was actually the lead author for the chapter on 'The Impact of Climate Change on Small Island Societies'. Dr. Leonard Nurse of the Cave Hill campus in Barbados and Dr. John Agard of the St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago also contributed to the panel. The Caribbean continues to teach the world.
Caribbean must learn
But we in the Caribbean must learn as well. Professor Norman Girvan and colleagues had already pointed out at a 1989 conference that Jamaica's industrialisation had cost the country. Bauxite mining since 1952 had disturbed over 62,700 acres of land; the processing of alumina had generated 50 tons of solid bauxite waste and 200 tons of caustic red mud. In the 1980s alone, 400 tons of soil had been lost from watersheds. There had been a 28-per cent decline of rainfall in the previous 30 years. There was an average rise of 2.3° centigrade in annual temperature. Deforestation was occurring at 3.3 per cent per year. Fifty rivers had died since 1947. More than 400,000 tons of carbon had been emitted due to forest burning.
Ecological problems arise from global climate change and each country, however small, contributes its own. We now have environmental impact assessments and the National Environment and Planning Agency. But in the scramble for investments, we need to do more to balance development between the needs of society with the condition of nature since we are depleting natural resources faster than we replace them.
Human societies seem to go to the edge of the abyss before pulling back. We, somehow, have to rediscover the balance that the Tainos had found between feeding all people and sustaining the environment at the same time, if there is still time to pull back.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, University of the West Indies, Mona. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.
