Injustice and failed democracy causes poverty and hunger
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
The hurricane that devastated New Orleans most likely gathered such intensity because of global warming. The increase in global warming is due to the excessive burning of fossil fuels to power our cars and heat our homes and to drive industry and produce wealth. Great, perhaps, if that wealth was justly shared. But it is not.
In the arctic the ice cap is melting at an alarming rate and sea levels are rising.
More alarming is the discovery that vast frozen area of Siberia, bigger than France and Germany together is thawing after being sealed 11,000 years ago by the onset of the last ice age. Billions of tons of methane gas now below the surface will be released into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times more deadly than carbon dioxide and will start off another chain reaction that will contribute to the rise in global temperature.
Human activity is responsible for most of this and perverse human nature is allowing it to continue unabated. The worst culprit is American industry, which produces more carbon dioxide than all the poor nations together.
According to the participants at a conference in Dublin, Ireland last week, the direct effect of global warming will be to add another 50 million poor to the starving masses around the globe.
It's a grim and troubling reality. Niger's famine is due to a draught and locusts. Water resources are drying up in many developing countries due to rising temperatures and farmers can't grow enough food to feed themselves and their families.
Food production in Africa is forecast to drop between 5-10 per cent by 2050. "Famine is not caused by a shortage of food, famine is caused by a shortage of justice", Duncan McLaren of Friends of the Earth of Scotland told the conference.
The history of Ireland, Ethiopia and Niger supports that opinion. The markets of Niger's towns are filled with food but it not available for the starving poor. Its like the Irish potato famine. When their crop failed hunger killed a million or more. The distribution of wealth is at the heart of hunger and poverty.
Who doesn't want a good and decent life and a right to freedom from hunger and poverty? An enlightened just and noble-minded society that has a government for all, by the true will of the people? This is the kind of nation where wealth is produced and shared for the good of all. That is what a democracy is supposed to be.
Nothing illustrates the failure of true democracy better than what is happening in New Orleans. Two thirds of the half million population are black and poor, the descendents of slaves. They had little before the hurricane and now they have even less.
There, democracy, the high-sounding religious slogans or the so-called moral majority that brought its latest bunch of leaders and representatives to power has failed miserably. It brought no just distribution of wealth and an end of racism, poverty and injustice and that is at heart of the Christian message. [End]
