Tag Archives: Hunger

Waiting Room: Attending to Degraded Fields and Empty Bellies, Dr. Robert Zuber

20 Sep

Time was a funny and fickle thing. Sometimes there was never enough of it, and other times it stretched out endlessly.  J. Lynn

All night you waited for morning, all morning for afternoon, all afternoon for night; and still the longing sings. Ruth Stone

You know, life fractures us all into little pieces. It harms us, but it’s how we glue those fractures back together that make us stronger.  Carrie Jones

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.  Mahatma Gandhi

The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time. Elie Wiesel

This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Marshall Sahlins

I was standing there, waiting for someone to do something; until I realized the person I was waiting for was myself. Markus Zusak

As the UN prepares for a commemoration of its 75th anniversary this Monday, the mood around the UN community is uneven; honoring its staying power and ample (if often unrecognized) global contributions combined with a sense of urgency, even dread, as threats to institutional legitimacy and sustainability mount. Moreover, the global commons represented in good measure by the UN seems to be unraveling in the face of large-power hostilities, expanding domains of authoritarian governance, a global pandemic with multiple iterations, broad-based economic contraction, and a bevy of sustainable development goals and targets that relevant data suggests are clearly headed in the wrong direction.

The Security Council plays a role in confirming this sobering assessment of the UN’s uneven potential given its unenforced resolutions; its back-room arm twisting especially of elected Council members; its largely tepid acknowledgement, let alone active enabling, of the essential contributions of other UN agencies, justice mechanisms and treaty bodies; even the habits of the permanent members to play by a different set of rules than they expect others to abide by. 

And yet, thanks in large measure to the growing determination of its elected membership, the Council has been encouraged to examine the scope and implications of a new generation of challenges affecting its primary mandate to maintain international peace and security.   Through a growing roster of “thematic” engagements, it is becoming apparent in ways that even permanent Council members cannot deny that such “maintenance” is more complex and comprehensive than perhaps ever before in UN history.

On Thursday, under Niger’s presidency, the Council spent an entire day examining the consequences of environmental degradation and hunger for conflict and, conversely, the impact of conflict on nutrition and livelihoods, on access to clean water and health facilities, on educational opportunity and mental health for children.  As noted by the executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, Ibrahim Thiaw, links between “humanity and the land” are profound and apply in both directions. We have too-often been derelict, he reminded, in respecting and protecting the land; thus human livelihoods and the communities whose vitality depends on them have been allowed to succumb to fire and drought, to flooding and erosion, and to violence from armed groups which remains as the source of so much global degradation.

During these important Council discussions held in the shadow of upcoming UN 75th year commemorations, one briefer after another laid bare the dire circumstances facing far too many children and other vulnerable persons in this world.  Briefers also highlighted the degree to which efforts to address acute needs by UN agencies and other actors are routinely impeded not only by access restrictions by states and attacks by spoilers, but also by a lack of funds, in many instances due to states making pledges of support they have yet to honor. 

And so the most desperate people wait, waiting under conditions that most of us in the well-resourced, oft-impatient West cannot fathom, waiting for provisions that will hopefully preserve their lives for another day, waiting for a shifting of environmental conditions that might allow them to stay in their homes and care for themselves and their neighbors, waiting for an end to the violence that engenders fear and impedes local initiatives at many levels.  In this context one truly moving statement of this day came from Under Secretary-General Lowcock who quoted a child in hunger, cholera and conflict-ravaged Yemen desperately imploring his father, “Daddy, when will the food come?” 

When indeed?  As ICRC director Maurer noted on Thursday, people living under severe environmental strain and resource deprivation “do not want a handout,” preferring (as we mostly all do) a future in which they can live in “independence” and dignity. But in some parts of the world basic needs are becoming more acute, not less, and the wait times for relief seem interminable and increasingly consequential. Moreover, the “social contract” that binds us in common interest is clearly “fracturing” all around, as Saint Vincent and the Grenadines lamented.  It is almost as though we are “losing interest” in each other as challenges multiply in all our lives and viable pathways towards the restoration of dignity and hope seem multiply blocked.

Clearly, we need to urgently raise the bar on the alleviation of human misery and the restoration of human potential, and there were a few clues offered on Thursday as to how this might become more feasible.  Belgium ably remarked that too much of our humanitarian response is now akin to a “fire extinguisher” rather than the “fire preventer” we need it to be.  And Ibrahim Thiaw wisely noted that, for all the remarkable work done by the humanitarian community, in the end “lives are saved but not changed.”

Such lack of change for people and communities, we might all agree, is simply not good enough, not for ourselves and certainly not for those now sitting more precariously than we will ever find ourselves on the precipice of ruin.   It may be the case, as Estonia stated on Thursday, that there is no “quick fix” for the messes we have gotten ourselves into, messes so dire that those most impacted cannot do much more than wait for someone to help attend to them.  Estonia also suggested a path forward that includes both increased diligence from policymakers and better access to relevant data to guide the practical renewal of energies and commitments to restore the land, restore livelihoods and restore hope. We need to keep those trucks and convoys moving as World Food Programme executive director Beasley noted.  But we must also more thoughtfully and and actively resist what he called a “toxic combination” of factors that threatens to undo all the gains on food security made over the past decade, dramatically decreasing the wait experienced by millions for some respite from what are often externally-imposed deprivations, with little more than empty stomachs and parched fields to mark the slow passage of time.

The untimely death on Friday of Ruth Bader Ginsburg was yet another painful reminder of how much we have all lost this year, but also how much time we have invested waiting for the fog of injustice to lift, the fires to die down, the jobs to come back, the pandemic death toll to abate. We are indeed facing an era of “hunger unprecedented,” for bread and health provisions, but also for the healing of personal and social fractures, for the return of some semblance of our collective sanity, for the restoration of our sense of solidarity, for the silencing of the guns on the streets of our communities.

For some of us, this is a time of considerable angst, even mourning. But for others, including for so many children in conflict settings, this is a time of agonized waiting for some urgent, sensitive and sustainable response from the rest of us. I know that I have not always made the best use of my pandemic-enforced opportunities to rethink our role in security and sustainable development and then play that out more effectively. Thus it is now well past time for me, and surely for others, to get off couches and computers, dust off the social contract, and help glue back together some of the many fractures stemming from this long and painful period.

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Food for Thought:  Diversifying the UN’s Peace and Security Shareholders, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 Jul

Japan as Security Council president for July held an open debate this past week on Council working methods, perhaps my favorite of all the Council meetings.

During the hours of discussion, Council members and other states aired their suggestions for reform, but also their frustrations with the pace of change, the political dynamics affecting the maintenance of international peace and security, the stubbornly uneven power dynamics within the Council, even the degree to which the Council remains reluctant to engage meaningfully on its core mandate with other relevant parts of the UN system.

We have our own suggestions for how the Council should recalibrate itself and have written about these previously.  One more recent suggestion involves restraint regarding what we see as the overuse of “condemnation” as a response to violent incidents or offenses against the international order.  Too much condemning with too little follow up is as likely to breed contempt as compliance, as most any teacher or parent can tell you.  Our preference, to the extent feasible, is for the Peacebuilding Commission’s evolving protocols on conflict and abuse – early and vigorous diplomatic response, steady and disciplined stakeholder engagement, and broad-based capacity support wherever needed.

But one working methods issue that strikes us as particularly noteworthy was raised on Tuesday by several states, including the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the Russian Federation. All made clear that, in this imperfect world, the Council’s agenda is now utterly overburdened with too many crises and competing agendas; too many lengthy ‘canned’ statements and overly complex press notes; too many negotiations producing resolutions of limited impact; too many ‘routine’ engagements leaving insufficient time for the Council to assess urgent conditions on the ground.

Through its thematic obligations, the Council has been (rightly) seized of the peace and security implications of women’s and children’s participation, climate change and drought, poverty and hunger, trafficking in drugs and arms, and much more.  However, states have reason to fear (and have expressed as much during Council debates) that Council involvement in these thematic areas often blurs the line between leveraging response capacity and exercising response control.  In that light, Russia and others have consistently called for the Council to concentrate on state-specific threats and leave thematic matters to the General Assembly, ECOSOC, and UN specialized agencies.

While we agree that the Council is overly burdened, should better respect the aptitude of other parts of the UN, and cease “stepping on the toes” of relevant stakeholders, it is also true that other UN agencies are not always willing to make the reverse linkage in the form of recognizing and articulating the full security implications of their own work.  If the Council is to be convinced to recognize security interests and expertise elsewhere in the UN, it would be helpful to see more evidence by other UN agencies of that recognition in return.

To some degree, this “recognition deficit” was on display in an otherwise fine side event this week hosted by the World Food Program (WFP).  The event  “El Niño-induced Drought in Southern Africa” was a lightly attended follow up to a larger event the day before on “Responding to the Impacts of El Niño and Mitigating Recurring Climate Risks,” featuring HE Mary Robinson, now the UN Special Envoy on El Niño and Climate.  Robinson as many of you know is quite a “legend” around UN Headquarters and she deftly cited the many places in the world –including southern Africa – where drought and flooding in some nefarious, climate-driven combination is creating havoc with communities and livelihoods.

The “southern Africa” event the following day covered a range of issues pertinent to what was described as a “level three emergency” after 2 years of what is now universally recognized as devastating drought in the region.  Conflict implications per se were not a major dimension of the conversation, and speakers seemed relatively uncomfortable examining the larger implicated “complexities” of the southern African crisis, though SADC’s Mhlongo did underscore the links between drought-related economic impacts and levels of gender violence and HIV infection.

Our office attended this event in (for us) large numbers, in part because of our solidarity with affected people in that region, in part because of our respect for the work of WFP, but also in part because of our belief that climate-related drought and hunger are (and will continue to be) major drivers of human conflict worldwide.

People eating their own seeds rather than planting them, people leaving emaciated cows to die in the fields rather than milking them, people staring helplessly into the traumatized faces of their nutrition and health compromised children rather than taking them to school, these are prime candidates for displacement and all of its attendant vulnerabilities, including conflict-related vulnerabilities.

And while it is reasonable for the WFP and others to focus on the areas closest to their mandate and ignore the larger concerns lurking both “on the ground” and elsewhere in the UN system, we explicitly urged them not to take this path.  Indeed, we softly reminded them of some of the relevant realities of the UN system – a system struggling to extract funds pledged to already existing crises, a system struggling as well to grasp and address the many potential ‘sparks’ of conflict — often blithely referred to as “root causes” – sparks to which all of us in this system need to be more fully attentive.

And a system that seems to be perpetually in competition within itself to keep focus and attention on matters of greatest urgency.  If Special Representative Kubiš is anywhere near correct in what he reported this past week to the Security Council, the upcoming military liberation from ISIL control of Mosul in Iraq will set off a humanitarian catastrophe of massive proportions, rapidly drying up available assistance and commanding (at least in the short term) most of the media headlines.

We mentioned the Kubiš prediction at the WFP/southern African event, and it was clearly not comfortable for the presenters to grasp how other global events could steal away attention from the regional, climate-induced crisis on their own agenda. It must be discouraging indeed to have to consider prospects of pledges of support un-made or un-honored, of compounding La Niña storms quickly turning parched fields into seas of mud that will only magnify misery and fuel conflict, and especially of other UN and state officials looking the other way towards more ‘compelling’ violence-inspired crises elsewhere.

Special Envoy Robinson has surely experienced such discouragement from many angles in her long and impact-filled career and she urged her audiences this week to constantly keep our numerous and complex threats in mind, especially as they impact future generations.  The “full-spectrum” response rightly sought by WFP for southern Africa requires commensurate, full spectrum mindfulness – not only of the effects of drought and hunger, but of their peace and security implications and of the sometimes competing capacities and interests of the UN system.   If we want a more focused, less political, more system-sensitive and less burdened Security Council – and we do – all parts of the UN must contribute more to a comprehensive assessment of peace and security risks and responsibilities, especially in times of crisis.  While we might want (or need) to believe otherwise, there simply is no part of our common work – on climate and poverty, on discrimination and justice — that does not also possess relevant peace and security dimensions.

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