The flooding in Pakistan is a truly horrific event, and even worse could be coming:
But the biggest problem may be an escalating food shortage. According to a report issued on 14 August by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 3.2 million hectares of standing crops and 200,000 head of livestock have been lost, along with most food supplies stored in affected homes. These figures will only grow, compounded by the fact that Sindh is one of the country’s main agricultural areas.
The situation can be partly salvaged if the winter wheat crop is planted by September, but that depends on clearing the sediment dumped by the floods. “Pakistan has the largest continuously managed irrigation system in the world,” says James Wescoat of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now the system is almost certainly silted up. Clearing it will be a huge task, especially now that floods and landslides have knocked out many roads.
Even more striking than the current misery and the potential food problem mentioned above, is that Funding Lags to Aid Pakistan’s Millions of Displaced:
Nick Clegg, the UK’s deputy prime minister, has called the international response to the floods “absolutely pitiful”.
He noted that the scale of the disaster is such that the public is struggling to understand just how great the need for aid is, and that that may be why donations are low compared to the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, the January Haiti earthquake or the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.
Other reasons may include the slow pace of floods, compared to more sudden and “dramatic” earthquakes and tsunamis, and the relatively low death toll of 1,600.
Britain is currently at the top of the donor list, having given around 26 million dollars in relief, closely followed by Australia, the U.S., Canada and Saudi Arabia.
There has been some criticism over India’s hesitancy in coming to Pakistan’s aid, prompting claims that a political spat may be at the root of the belated and small pledge of five million dollars, which is only a tiny fraction of India’s 500-million-dollar aid budget for the year.
Critics claim that Pakistan was quick to help India after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, which killed 25,000 people.
I don’t want to wade into the relations between India and Pakistan, which haven’t always been the best, to put it mildly, but this seems like a perfect opportunity for India to improve that situation. Nothing will change hearts and minds quicker than generosity in a time of need.
In a larger sense, the overall level of aid is indeed “absolutely pitiful.” Why might that be?
Many parts of the world are still feeling less than economically robust, which clearly reduces the contributions from individuals, although I doubt that explains more than a small portion of the anomaly.
The more cynical among us (but not me, I hasten to add) might want to point to racism, an all too common reason for many of humanity’s sins against humanity, but the examples called out in the article of events that triggered greater amounts of aid seem to kill that notion.
One potential factor that came to mind was “compassion fatigue” (or “donor fatigue”). Coming toward the end of what feels like a long season of terrible news from Russia, the Gulf of Mexico, and generally miserable heat and humidity in places like most of the US, would also tend to suppress giving. But again, that’s only private contributions, not that from governments.
Pakistan hasn’t received nearly the amount of press coverage in the US that one might expect, yet another factor putting downward pressure on private donations.
Frankly, I’m stumped.
Take a step back from current events and ask what happens in the next decade or so if such tragedies become much more routine. Coastal flooding (putting the food and water for millions in Bangladesh at risk, for example), tropical storms, crop shortfalls because of drought and heat, even a lack of water for personal consumption and use as mountain glaciers, “natures reservoirs”, continue to disappear all have the potential for major, near term human impacts as climate change sinks its fangs ever deeper into humanity.
We talk a lot about the costs of climate change impacts — with emissions X and climate change Y we’ll have impacts totaling Z dollars/year by 2050, etc. But those are very high level estimates that gloss over some thorny details, like exactly where those dollars come from, who makes the decisions to donate, and how might those donations change according to factors unrelated to each event, some of those reasons being very ugly.
How long would it take for people in “rich” countries to see one or more such “natural” tragedies every year before they would simply stop caring and stop giving, and worst of all, stop supporting decisions by their elected officials to give? Would we reach a Machiavellian point where people in the US (or Europe or Canada or Australia or …) say nothing and give nothing, while thinking, “the world already has too many people; better they go than me.”[1] I realize how blindingly offensive that thought is, and even beyond that its surface level vileness is absurdity, given how much more people in the countries I listed consume and emit than the average person on the afflicted countries.
But could it happen? Could one of the worst impacts of being pounded year after year by climate change be a change to our very nature? I’m almost afraid to find out the answer.
[1] Given some of the truly disgusting things we hear already from some of the right wingers on talk radio, it would be tempting to say we’re nearly there already. I’m making an exception for those miscreants and assuming, perhaps too generously, that they won’t really mean it when they’re the first ones to say such things publicly.
I’m torn on this one. It’s like oxfam. I’ve donated a fair amount of money to oxfam over the years b/c I think the work they do is valuable. However, I have had my moments when I ask myself what is the point of doing this from a human-race standpoint? I see the value of compassion, empathy of helping out those who need help but those are only valuable to me individually. They only help me.
If I think about acting globally about what the human race should be doing to preserve the human race I sometimes wonder if we shouldn’t be letting disasters happen. It’s not a nice thought and it is not something to be thought of snidely or lightly. I’m sure if I was the person suffering through the disaster my thoughts would be for my own personal preservation and that of my family. But does my personal discomfort justify not allowing the rest of the species to take advantage of the fact that there will be fewer people consuming a finite amount of resources?
Whenever you see the world put in terms of an increasing number of people and relatively zero-sum amount of energy and other resources it becomes hard to not start talking purely in numbers. If you think about species preservation as the single biological goal of the actions of the rest of the population it’s difficult to see it otherwise.
But then my question is – if we are so hard minded as to see the world this way, why did we bother to develop social and political institutions with the directed intent to limit suffering and equalize the allocation of opportunities (if not actually ever equalizing the allocation of resources).
It’s not trivial to answer and I find I end up here:
- When I give money to an aid effort I feel bad about it for the fate of the species b/c I’ve all but definitely guaranteed more population growth.
- When I don’t give money to an aid effort I feel bad about it for the fate of those suffering b/c I’ve not helped someone and potentially doomed them to suffer and die.
And I really don’t know how to make that better for me, for those suffering or for the species.
I hope this doesn’t come across as cold or flippant, I sincerly do not mean it that way.
Thank God global warming is a hoax
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fg%2Fa%2F2010%2F08%2F18%2Fnotes081810.DTL#ixzz0wwKCKp8B
The Chaos has begun. What are we to do?
Seth:
Your comments mirror my feelings to an almost eerie extent.
As for your question about why we created these aid institutions in the first place, I think it comes down to the diversity of human experience and world view. There will always be some people much more inclined to take a long term view (generally, but not exclusively “let it happen”), and some focused on the short term (generally “I don’t care, we have to help”). We also have people who see the big picture and the perversely interconnected nature of our world, and others who compartmentalize the world into seemingly more tractable segments. I don’t mean to imply any relationship between those two dichotomies, e.g. the long term people are the interconnected people, etc.
My point is that such institutions can arise from the actions of a segment of population, largely because it’s so difficult to publicly argue against such efforts. Whether founding and funding these institutions is “right” approach is another matter entirely, but I think that’s how we get Oxfam and racist hate groups, just to pick two wildly different examples, arising from the same society.
Paul:
Thanks for linking to that Morford piece, even though it turned me about 12 shades of green with envy. It’s a classic case of something I wish I’d written, which is the highest praise a writer can grudgingly dispense.
As for your question about what are we to do… Fight! We fight to the point of exhaustion, and then we find a way to fight some more. We have to find the answers, the ways to overcome the greed and myopia that infect so many in all the key countries around the world and prevent us from acting in our own best interest. (I have a sticky note on my monitor that says, “Stupidity is an emergent property.”) As Gene Kranz, Flight Director of Apollo 13, famously said, “Failure is not an option.”
The only hope that I can offer Seth is not so much disaster related as directed at the question of develpment/poverty and population. Disasters can happen anywhere, its just that the wealthy have more resources to cope with it. And yes disasters can setback development so there is certainly some relation…
As societies develop from the point where most of the people are poor to the point where most of the people are not poor, population growth slows. The are some exceptions (China 1 child policy comes to mind) but I’d say the trend is pretty clear. There are many other factors besides proportion of population in poverty involved in driving population growth–like simple biological urges, belief systems etc.–aka I’m grossly simplifing matters.
Further complicating things is that poverty is also a relative concept…but to come back to my main point, development generally leads to reduced poverty and reduced birthrates.
So for me the problem becomes how do we get more development (& faster) using fewer remaining resources? Is it possible?…if it is not, then we better find a way off the rock, and the sooner the better.
Disdaniel,
That’s a slower birthrate, – but it’s still an increasing total. When you start a base of 7billion which by a lot of estimates is between 3 and 5 billion people in overshoot you have to do more than slow the RATE of growth.