The Conflict Trap

Drawing parallels between the book I am currently reading, (well, re-reading), Paul Collier's wonderful "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It," and today's news streaming down my computer screen courtesy of the BBC. Collier laments constantly about the "Traps:" those conditions which hold the poorest nations in a cycle of instability and economic malaise; looking at the news today about famine being declared in Somalia, already a failed state, I think of the regional ramifications for this newest humanitarian disaster. Collier states, "Many of the costs are borne by neighboring countries...Since most countries are bordered by several others, the overall cost to neighbors can easily exceed the cost to the country itself." And while it is calloused to think of a newly declared famine in the terms of "costs," the spiraling effects of these regional calamities are hard to understate.  Reading further in the news: riots in Malawi, an attempted assasination in Guinea; just when the "bad old days" seemed to be over, the fractures reappear so easily in the poorest nations in the world; the image band-aids are so easily peeled away by the softest of breezes.   

Collier on "The Bottom Billion:" The countries at the bottom coexist with the twenty-first century, but their reality is fourteenth century: civil war, plague, ignorance. They are concentrated in Africa and Central Asia, with a scattering elsewhere. Even during the 1990's, in retrospect the golden decade between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, incomes in this group declined by 5 percent. We must learn to turn the familiar numbers upside down: a total of five billion people who are already prosperous, or at least on track to be so, and the one billion who are stuck at the bottom."

Famine or Plenty?

Reading of the newest round of desperation in the Horn of Africa, the failed rains of Somalia, the floods of refugees pouring into Kenya, threatening to destabilize, once again, an unimaginably fragile region, I am brought to the words of Richard Kapucinski, and others who have preached the same lessons about the way things are. Can we ever learn from the past if the present is so powerfully blinding?

“People are not hungry because there is no food in the world. There is plenty of it; there is a surplus, in fact. But between those who want to eat and te bursting warehouses stands a tall obstacle indeed: politics...Whoever has weapons, has food. Whoever has food, has power. We are here among people who do not contemplate transcendence and the existence of soul, the meaning of life and the nature of being. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day.” The Shadow of the Sun