Not a lot of lols in this one, I'm afraid. It's just not terribly funny.
I recently visited the Imperial War Museum to see Shaped By War, the exhibition of Don McCullin’s war photography. The images were earth-shattering. One or two were particularly striking; a shell-shocked marine in Vietnam, eyes wide with horror, trying to unsee what can never be forgotten. A Greek Cypriot woman’s grief in the moment she learns of her husband’s death. But the pictures that stayed with me are the children. A Bangladeshi child screaming with hunger in her mother’s arms, face wet with tears; a starving albino Ethiopian boy, eyes huge with reproach and exhaustion; an abandoned baby in the mud, bawling with loss and terror. In a Beirut mental hospital, a scene of utter bedlam during the massacre of Palestinians by Phalangist Christians, one figure alone caught my eye amidst the chaos; one little girl, naked on the ground in the bottom right of the photograph – hardly the focus – but her face is contorted in a primal scream of confusion.
A ‘biblical famine.’ This was Michael Buerke’s appraisal of the suffering in Ethiopia in 1984. The images flooding out of Africa precipitated a global response, much needed media attention, and a subsequent flood of aid, as did Bob Geldof’s presence and Band Aid. The world declared a lesson learned, and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) was established in the region to aid efficient prevention of starvation on a massive scale rather than cure; Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) initiatives boomed. The media presence in the area refused to allow the world to forget, and moved unprecedented numbers of people to donate. Governments around the world were held to account; failure to intervene while highly emotive images of dead and dying children were beamed across the globe would have been political suicide.
Why? Because to see a child starve to death is to see where we as an increasingly global community have failed, and continue to fail. And the pity – and guilt – we feel is infinitely powerful.
But it seems that we have become all too dependent on such images. When the recent 2011 famine in the Horn of Africa loomed – affecting Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia – it took time for even the UN to declare an emergency. FEWS Net had forecast famine as early as November 2010, but it was not until July 2011 – when the journalists arrived – that the UN offered its first tentative aid deliveries to the region.
Eight months had slipped away before the world took significant action. In this time, famine – defined as such when a terrible 30% of children are acutely malnourished, and 20% of a population is without food – took hold. Not only is the shambolic response ‘criminally wasteful’, according to The Economist, but resulted in the needless deaths of thousands. Children are disproportionately affected; too many died in the interim from starvation, and from diseases their tiny bodies were too weak to fight. By this point, almost ten million people were in serious danger of death by starvation. It was the pictures of these starving people that caused the well-meaning people in the wealthy West to reach for their chequebook. In and of itself, this is by no means a bad thing.
The problem is that by this point – the point at which children’s stomachs balloon beneath razor-sharp ribs – the damage has already been done. Famine has not been averted, and people have not been protected. Treatment of famine-related illnesses and starvation is expensive, and bringing a severely underweight child out of danger is more costly and difficult than maintaining the condition of a healthy one. Prior to the famine in Niger in 2005, the cost of preventive aid was put at $7 per person. When famine struck, the cost of simply keeping a person alive rose to $23. The media, despite its power to galvanise empathy, too often arrives too late; and donors are unwilling to donate without the guarantee of media coverage, even in the face of official warnings of impending disaster. Perhaps this is misplaced altruism; a picture of a dying child shocks the world into greater action, and therefore more generous donation, than a thousand images of laughing toddlers ever could. Put bluntly, more money can be made by waiting. Our empathy for the starving innocents of the world has worked against them.
Prevention is surely better than cure. But the question becomes one of how to mobilise a population so saturated with images of suffering that only the most terrible of pictures will rouse us from apathy. It is now more apparent than ever to find the answer to this question; another drought is predicted by FEWS Net in the Horn of Africa this summer, and at this moment, renewed fighting between Sudan and South Sudan over oil and land has displaced thousands, leaving them vulnerable to food insecurity. If further human tragedy is to be avoided, DRR must be given adequate time and funding to work.
The world’s food reserves are abundant. Starvation is not a simple consequence of drought and dearth. The same can be said of aid; it is demonstrably and admirably present – but only when the cameras are rolling. In 1997, FEWS Net produced an inquiry simply entitled, ‘What Went Wrong’. The paper demanded that the world answer for its failure to respond quickly enough to save lives in the wake of the Niger drought of the 80s in that killed so many. It asked that we do better next time.
But the next time, and the time after that, and even after that, has come and gone, and still the world has failed to react. A child should not have to wait for a cameraman to turn up before she gets the food she needs to live. Yes, the human suffering angle is potent; yes, it musters support in an undeniably important way. But the causes of such events cannot be swept to one side. Engineers Without Borders, with its awareness of the potentially detrimental appetite for disaster coverage, has come up with this campaign: ‘Sponsor an African Child Spreadsheet’. Perhaps this is the way forward; increasing awareness of the need for preventive measures. The individual suffering must not be forgotten – but we must not wait until their plight becomes irreversible before we recognise it as real.
