"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
Listen: Of social intervention and top-down approaches
Listen
Let's face it; an imponderably large amount of us, sitting on our comfy chairs, in front of our fancy laptop computers, relatively well-clothed and certainly well fed [many of us too well fed, might I add] have no idea what it's like to be hungry, I mean we call 'hunger' that feeling that we get when it's past four in the afternoon and we haven't eaten more than a few pieces of toast, a mug of coffee and some scrambled eggs. We don't know what it's like to live on the streets, and no, before you ask, that time you were too drunk to get home and got a few hours of sleep in a public bus or in a park doesn't really count either. We have no clue what it feels like to be a child soldier, or to be taken as a political prisoner [although some of us here in Latin America, amongst other places, grew up with first-hand stories about things too horrible to forget]. Most of us have probably never even drunk a glass of dirty water; lots of people do.
When confronted with such circ**stances it's easy to think that you have all the answers: "Someone's hungry? come on, how hard can it be! just give the guy some food! What? Thirsty? Okay, let's give them a couple thousand gallons of water, it's not like water's that expensive! Cold? Here, have some blankets. Don't know how to grow food? there you go, have an old book that I photocopied. Of course, if problems were easy to solve, they wouldn't really be problems, don't you think?
And of course it sounds silly when I say it, I'm being pretty sarcastic, don't you think? fact is, everyone from the most powerful government in the planet to random people on the tube to my girlfriend's second cousin's father is taking this approach: why? because it sounds like such a good idea! The US gives away loads of free food each year: there's a program called Food for Peace which basically gives away food to people who really need it; poor people, kids, pregnant ladies, etcetera.
Ooo, look at those evil americans, giving food to hungry people, how evil is that! the horror!
Okay, no, I'm not saying it's evil: I'm simply saying it's shortsighted: solutions need to be stable, and we all hear that old saying, you know which one, about giving people fish or teaching them how to get it. It doesn't take an ivy league economist to tell you that if you dump into a country half it's gross domestic product in corn, it's gonna have all kinds of bad consequences. First of all, you quickly turn farmers into unemployed people, since food prices drop dramatically, and poverty plus unemployment equals what? that's right! more crime and hunger, violence and corruption in the long run.
Problems are not only terrible, they're also complicated. This is people we're talking about, and one individual person is more complicated that any machine ever made by anyone. Just imagine what kind of intricacies upon intricacies emerge when you put people together. Human groups are incredibly complicated, and this means that no simple solution is going to make it all right.
We don't know what hunger, homelessness, child draft, torture, extreme poverty, water shortages or illiteracy are like, and it doesn't make any sense to assume we do. It's actually harmful if we get it wrong, which is the tricky thing: However, there's people who know what hunger is like: hungry people. No solution that doesn't take into account the voice of the people we want to help is going to accomplish anything. Knowing is half the battle, and much knowledge lies with the people.
Views: 14
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Comment by Andrew Jensen on March 19, 2010 at 4:30am
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Very nicely put. However, it's also a bit disempowering for those of us sitting in front of our fancy laptops who want to help. Obviously we don't know enough about the situation on the ground in the 3rd world country to make decisions about what to do, so what should we do instead? And "Listen to them" is a little unspecific. What are they saying? How do we put our resources and their knowledge together?
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Comment by Tomás Boncompte Lezaeta on March 19, 2010 at 6:41am
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Well, research of course. Ethnography, involvement, talking, even grounded theory. You learn about people the same way you can learn about anything else; you either go look at it, or you ask people who have.
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And have you? I mean, are you one of those people I could ask? Or can you point me to them? Because I think ending this discussion without pointing at resources for appropriate research just leaves the reader going "I no longer know what to do" which kills momentum and enthusiasm.
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All I'm saying is doing things right is harder, and it needs knowledge: I haven't been to, say, africa, but I do live in a third world country, and have done some research on the local reality. Things being hard doesn't mean that one should be discouraged, just prepared. There's extensive studies by various UN organism, and other ONGs, about the various humanitarian realities which exist around the world, which are good starting points.
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