Where the promised donation of six billion dollars remains, David Beasley asked Elon Musk via the press on Monday. Beasley heads the United Nations’ World Food Program, Musk is the man who thinks he’s god in his own universe, and the former recently elicited from the latter a promise to donate a few of his billions to the fight against of world hunger.
Musk would indeed have put about $6 billion into charities after that. “Everyone thought it went to us,” Beasley told the Associated Press on Monday, “but we haven’t received anything yet. I’m hopeful.’
Fighting hunger is an acute need, or well, hunger is a permanent problem, because somewhere in the world there is always hunger of the kind that makes people languish and children get dwarfism and developmental disabilities, although you don’t see it every day on television. . See Yemen, see Afghanistan, see Syria.
Every now and then you can hear the grating from uninformed throats ‘that’s because of overpopulation’ or words to that effect, but the great American-French activist Susan George already dealt with this nonsense in the 1970s. How the Other Half Diesthe systemic book on famines that generations of aid workers have had on their shelves.
Because there is more than enough food, there is more than we can eat and mountains of good food are thrown away every day. Hunger is usually the result of cynical trade-offs of political, military and economic interests: war, market protection, monopoly enforcement, the desire to squeeze the enemy and/or competitor, overly fragile trade chains that no one wants to change because too much money is involved. earned, no distribution to some places because it makes too little money. Furthermore: the usual greed and wickedness, the lack of sufficient will and combined forces, mixed with changing weather conditions, natural forces, bad luck and powerlessness.
As it is now, as the Russian occupier continues to blockade Ukrainian ports, leaving fine Ukrainian wheat in danger of being left in the barns. Grown on the intensely fertile black soil they grow there tsjornozem call (at de Volkskrant nobody can pronounce that word as beautifully as former Ukraine correspondent Fleur de Weerd, who can write beautifully about it).
Ukrainian wheat feeds a significant part of the world, prices of everything from the fertilizer to grow the food to the diesel to transport it have soared to unprecedented levels. The threat of hunger is therefore even greater than usual. That is why Beasley is to be found these days in Davos, to shake a conscience the wealthy and powerful of the earth who assemble there.
There’s plenty to kick. The Russian regime that refuses to sacrifice whole parts of the world that depend on Ukraine for nourishment to a colonial delusion. The food producers who are becoming even more wealthy than they already were (‘food billionaires’, Oxfam already coined) are now experiencing a spike in prices. Western governments that still don’t dare make billionaires like Musk pay much more in taxes so that Beasley doesn’t have to depend on the philanthropy of wealthy individuals who want to determine for themselves what the common good is for fighting hunger. There is work to be done.