The latest sandwich craze is Panini in all of its various permutations. Thankfully Sloppy Joes haven’t returned! At one of my favourite haunts, they have a Popeye Panini with mozzarella cheese, spinach and an assortment of other goodies enveloped into the bread. It’s a drippy, messy gorgeous meal best spent with friends. With luck, the spinach will produce the results promised by those eternal Popeye cartoons!
It was heavenly… both the sandwich and the company.
When I arrived home after a later than expected lunch, I popped on the computer quickly to check email to see what was happening in my world before scooting off to the next job. I also happened to check world news which is not something I do consistently.
For some reason, Africa seems to be largely left out of the loop when it comes to widespread information. A financial crisis in Greece, a volcano in Iceland or an earthquake in China and the world press is all over it. At this moment in the Eastern Sahel region of West Africa there are ten million people at risk from starvation. How much news has been spread about this?
Very little.
Nomadic tribal chief Ibrahim Mangari walks past the carcass of a cow that he says died of hunger, in Gadabeji, Niger. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)-pa)
The world news agencies gloss over such events because they aren’t sexy. No-one wants to read about events that take a long time to happen. The suddenness of an earthquake in Haiti and the immediate devastation of the people there spreads over the news in living colour like an oil slick over an ocean with half the evening reports spent covering how sad we are and how to help those “poor people recover from a fate they didn’t deserve”.
Usually, there are myriad photos of homeless orphans attached to the reports.
In the Sahel region, particularly in Niger, uranium mining and agriculture are the principal industries. Just five years ago a similar drought devastated the region. Though agencies like Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders are in the region, they have few resources to aid the undernourished. The real culprit is the global economic downturn. People worldwide are struggling to maintain their way of life and, while feeling badly for these people (and others), haven’t the resources themselves.
Where is Bono and the World Bank?
The real global crisis in my opinion is that we don’t feed these people consistently at all; not just in Africa but anywhere. Just give them food and ignore the cost. Is there not a solution to world hunger that disqualifies economic boundaries? I have often heard that economies direct resources; that it’s expensive to “save the world”. That if these people really wanted to get out of their plight, they would learn to join the global economy and prosper as we in the West have in our past.
Less than one quarter of the people in Niger and the Sahel region are literate. How many times has the cure for cancer died in the mind of a neglected child because of our ineptitude to feed and educate all people?
When do we learn that simply feeding people doesn’t solve the problem? When do we learn to care for all peoples with our hearts and minds rather than our pocketbooks? Does it really make sense to allow economy to determine whether people starve or not? Few of these people understand an economic system we have set up. Few of them know what economy is. Few of these people know what is outside their troubled region.
They didn’t build the system yet we expect them to live with it and understand it. As a global society, we are highly unfair.
My Panini suddenly left an aftertaste I wasn’t particularly fond of.
