Bigas or bullets

Even though I grew up here in London, there are still some things that make me feel like a “living exhibit” at the St. Louis World Fair – I mean in the sense of being dislocated, in a strange place that I can’t square with my experience. Those moments are more frequent after I’ve spent some time in situations of hardship. I found I couldn’t eat at a buffet at a fancy hotel in Manila, because I kept remembering the people I’d just left behind in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. It made me feel ill and guilty to be there.

In London it’s coconut water in tetrapaks and turmeric root under plastic in grocery stores stop me in my tracks. Cognitive dissonance. “That’s wrong!” I squeak to my friend. “What?” he asks. How can I explain the times I’ve stopped for a break while walking through the country in Maguidanao or Laguna and someone leaps up a tree to get its plentiful fruit for our refreshment. In my head I can hear the sound of a bolo thunk thunk and taste the weird slightly metallic slightly salty tepid sweet water on my tongue. Back in London, I say “It’s supposed to be free!” because here it costs at least 3 pounds (P185). At my mother’s place in Laguna, luyang dilaw grows wild in the garden; in London it’s 12.99 pounds (P803) a kilo.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been helping bring groceries to fellow Filipinas who for one reason or another don’t have access to food. One such delivery was in a very swanky part of town, and I was surprised the lady needed help. She told me she wasn’t allowed out by her boss nor was she being given any food allowance despite their living in a house that must’ve been worth millions. Another said her boss let her go because of the lockdown and she had no livelihood. Another lady was in her 70s, and categorised as “shielded” (not allowed out to protect her from COVID-19) because of her age and health. She asked me to get foodstuffs that were easy to peel because she had problems with her arthirits and lived on her own.

My point is that there is no real shortage of food, but if you don’t have money you can’t eat. Food production and distribution systems were failing to feed the world long before the COVID-19 pandemic. But perhaps the hunger experienced now can provide the impetus to fix them.

“At the same time while dealing with a COVID-19 pandemic, we are also on the brink of a hunger pandemic,” said David Beasley, UN World Food Programme (WFP) executive director at the UN Security Council on April 21. He made the case in blunt terms that “millions of civilians living in conflict-scarred nations, including many women and children, face being pushed to the brink of starvation, with the spectre of famine a very real and dangerous possibility.” Even before the pandemic it was estimated that 135 million people on earth are marching toward the brink of starvation, in the Global Report on Food Crisis. According to Beasley, WFP analysis shows that, due to the Coronavirus, an additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020.  That’s a total of 265 million people.

The WFP is the leading humanitarian organization that delivers food assistance in emergencies and also works with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience. I’ve seen their teams roll up all over the world working in the most challenging conditions. They have significant expertise and their warning should be taken seriously.

The danger is that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself.  Lockdown and economic recession will lead to a major loss of income for the working poor.

Beasley warned “if we don’t prepare and act now – to secure access, avoid funding shortfalls and disruptions to trade – we could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months.”

Famines are not about lack of food. Nobel economics laureate, Amartya Sen, famously found that food production in famines such as the Great Famine in Bengal in 1943 had not declined. Rather, food prices had soared while farm wages had sagged, making it hard for rural workers to buy food. Sen is also famous for writing that “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” in Democracy as Freedom.

In the Philippines, just as in Sen’s native India, inequalities are very large. But there are increasing restrictions on media freedom through various means. Sen would say that open public discussion “makes the predicament of the deprived heard, politically significant and protects the endangered.” Now there’s the lockdown, the day laborers and provincial migrants who people Manila’s slums. They cannot go outside to look for jobs, so they can’t survive. Some residents are saying that they and their families are more likely to die of hunger than of catching the coronavirus.

Much more attention could be paid to equitable pandemic management, to laborers who’ve lost their jobs or the many migrant workers, hundreds of miles from their homes. Instead hungry protesters have been jailed by police in riot gear.

A few days before Beasley made his grim warnings, Sen sounded a more positive note, though far from optimistic. History, he wrote in the Financial Times, has shown that some crises can lead to improved equality and access to food and healthcare. As was the case in Britain after World War 2 when the government arranged equal food sharing, through rationing and social support. Chronically undernourished people were much better fed than ever before. A similar thing happened with better-shared medical attention. The results were astounding. The National Health Service, now staffed with so many Filipino and other migrant workers, is the crown jewel of the project. Its existence has played a huge role in reducing the public health impact of the current coronavirus outbreak.

There is still time to save lives and build a more sustainable, peaceful and equal society, it depends on which of history’s lessons we choose to learn and what vision we have for the future.

Bigas or bullets?