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Famine Crimes
Feb. 4th, 2010 09:17 amCopy of an email sent today
Mr. Cave,
Thanks for a masterful summing up of the chaos caused by feeding programs and the doers of good [in Haiti]. It makes me despair of human nature. Briefly, famine/disaster management has been a subject of academic concern since Geldof's 1984 feed Ethiopia concerts had unintended consequences explored and confronted by Alex de Waal in his 1997 book, Famine Crimes, which also owes a great deal to the Nobel prize winning work of Amartya Sen, who found that famines are always man-made.
De Waal went on to become one of the founders of a scholarly journal, Disasters: The Journal of Disaster Studies, which has no less than 13 free links to earthquake disaster management up right now.
Mary B. Anderson's 1999 Do No Harm analyzes the depredations of the doers of good.
Court Robinson's Terms of Refuge, about the largest immigration, I believe, in the 20th century --the SE Asians of the 1980s -- is electrifying on the subject of the United Nations' consigning these lost souls back to their untenable countries because no one wants refugees of color -- including the massacre of Cambodians forced by Thai govt soldiers at gunpoint over the precipice at Preah Vihear back into Cambodia.
The single most valuable book about food distribution and the depredations of aid volunteers -- one including a guy who is one of the richest people in Canada and a mover and shaker among Mennonite missions (sometimes racist) -- is Rice, Rivalry and Politics by Mason and Brown.
Your story sounds exactly like what they wrote about the Cambodian camps in 1985; I believe their book has been used as a Yale business school case study.
You might also want to take a look at Marcus on famine crimes in international law -- how governments manipulate food distribution to create what arguably is genocide (my letter making these points in response to Marcus' piece was published in a subsequent issue of that journal).
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3100102
None of these institutions have any institutional memory about the awful chaos they cause among people already suffering the nadir of extremity. If you can read one of these books, the Mason/Brown one is the one.
Thanks again.
( Cave's NYT piece on chaos caused by feeding programs in Haiti )
Mr. Cave,
Thanks for a masterful summing up of the chaos caused by feeding programs and the doers of good [in Haiti]. It makes me despair of human nature. Briefly, famine/disaster management has been a subject of academic concern since Geldof's 1984 feed Ethiopia concerts had unintended consequences explored and confronted by Alex de Waal in his 1997 book, Famine Crimes, which also owes a great deal to the Nobel prize winning work of Amartya Sen, who found that famines are always man-made.
De Waal went on to become one of the founders of a scholarly journal, Disasters: The Journal of Disaster Studies, which has no less than 13 free links to earthquake disaster management up right now.
Mary B. Anderson's 1999 Do No Harm analyzes the depredations of the doers of good.
Court Robinson's Terms of Refuge, about the largest immigration, I believe, in the 20th century --the SE Asians of the 1980s -- is electrifying on the subject of the United Nations' consigning these lost souls back to their untenable countries because no one wants refugees of color -- including the massacre of Cambodians forced by Thai govt soldiers at gunpoint over the precipice at Preah Vihear back into Cambodia.
The single most valuable book about food distribution and the depredations of aid volunteers -- one including a guy who is one of the richest people in Canada and a mover and shaker among Mennonite missions (sometimes racist) -- is Rice, Rivalry and Politics by Mason and Brown.
Your story sounds exactly like what they wrote about the Cambodian camps in 1985; I believe their book has been used as a Yale business school case study.
You might also want to take a look at Marcus on famine crimes in international law -- how governments manipulate food distribution to create what arguably is genocide (my letter making these points in response to Marcus' piece was published in a subsequent issue of that journal).
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3100102
None of these institutions have any institutional memory about the awful chaos they cause among people already suffering the nadir of extremity. If you can read one of these books, the Mason/Brown one is the one.
Thanks again.
( Cave's NYT piece on chaos caused by feeding programs in Haiti )
